This tool compares your chart of accounts against what a service business needs, and shows you three lists.
Missing required accounts
Categories your reports need and your books do not have. These are the ones to add, because a report cannot show you a breakdown of something it has nowhere to put.
Recommended additions
Not required, but useful for a business like yours. Worth adding the ones that match how you actually work and skipping the rest — a chart of accounts with categories nobody uses is its own problem, handled in cleanup.
Suggested renames
Accounts whose names will not mean anything to you in a year, with a clearer name offered for each.
This is the list most worth taking seriously, and the one most likely to be skipped as cosmetic. An account called "Misc Expense 2" is where things go to become invisible. Every month somebody files something there because nothing else fits, and by year end it is a number nobody can explain — including to an accountant, who will ask.
Applying the template
The whole recommended structure can be applied at once rather than account by account.
Worth doing on a young business or one whose books have never been set up deliberately. On an established set of books, work through the individual lists instead — the template is a good default and your existing structure may encode decisions worth keeping.
When it says you are fine
If the tool reports the chart of accounts looks good, take the win and move on to uncategorised transactions. Having the right categories and nothing filed into them is the more common situation.
