Chart of Accounts

1. How it works

As explained in the Accounting API docs, Hurdlr's "Invisible" Double-Entry Accounting is enabled in the background for all users. That is built on-top of Hurdlr's best practice Chart of Accounts, vetted by hundreds of CPAs and accountants, and custom-fitted to your users' needs.

When you create a user via the Hurdlr API, and you specify their business type, Hurdlr automatically generates a chart of accounts for that user. Should that user's situation change, e.g. they convert from a sole-proprietorship to an S-corporation, Hurdlr's API will take care of the necessary modifications to the Chart of Accounts accordingly. As you may know, the Equity section will look different for sole proprietorships vs. S-corps, and the Hurdlr API takes care of this for you, ensuring your products will serve your users as they continue to evolve.

2. What it enables

Having a Chart of Accounts behind the scenes means that your users always have a Balance Sheet available with data updated in real-time. Most businesses have to wait for their accountant to compile their Balance Sheet at the beginning of the following month. With the Hurdlr API, this is available in real-time!

3. Getting the user's chart of accounts

At any time, you can retrieve the user's chart of accounts:

curl \
  --request GET \
  --url https://sandbox.hurdlr.com/rest/v5/accounting/chartOfAccounts \
  --header 'Authorization: Bearer ${access_token}' \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \

The response from GET /chartOfAccounts contains an array of accounts, with nested childAccounts:

[
  {
    "accountNo": "10000",
    "name": "Assets",
    "balance": 250917.65,
    "parentAccountNo": null,
    "childAccounts": [
      {
        "accountNo": "11000",
        "name": "Current Assets",
        "balance": 250917.65,
        "parentAccountNo": "10000",
        "childAccounts": [
          {
            "accountNo": "11001",
            "name": "Citi - Checking *0000",
            "balance": 5475.11,
            "parentAccountNo": "11000",
            "childAccounts": []
          },
          {
            "accountNo": "11002",
            "name": "Citi - Savings *1111",
            "balance": 21.10,
            "parentAccountNo": "11000",
            "childAccounts": []
          },
          ...
        ]
      },
      ...    
    ]
  },
  ...
]

4. Displaying a real-time balance sheet

The above response contains a hierarchical list of accounts, making it easy to display a drill-down list of accounts. On each account record, you may find the following attributes to be of particular interest:

Field	Description	Format
accountNo	Account number, often used by bookkeepers to reference a specific account	String (of numbers)
name	Name of the account	String
balance	Total balance of the account, including all children accounts	Numeric, with 2 decimal places
childAccounts	Accounts that are hierarchically beneath the given account	Array of accounts

To display a real-time balance sheet, you can simply show a list of the top-level accounts, i.e. the accountNo, name, and balance of each of the accounts residing in the top-level objects of the /chartOfAccounts response. For example, response[0].name would show "Assets" and response[1].name would show "Liabilities.

If your users clicks on Assets, you could then render the childAccounts within that item. For example, response[0].childAccounts[0].name would show "Current Assets".

The Hurdlr API team recognizes that developers are not usually accountants. Don't hesitate to email us at [email protected], and we would be glad to help you with your real-time balance sheet implementation.