How to Update Your Budget Chart of Accounts

Overview

When your chart of accounts changes in your bookkeeping software, your budget in Reach Reporting may show discrepancies. Budgets PRO includes tools to quickly identify and resolve these mismatches, so you can stay confident in your numbers without starting from scratch.

Warning Icons: Identifying Mismatched Accounts

When your budget's chart of accounts no longer matches your current bookkeeping’s chart of accounts, Reach Reporting will flag the issue in two places:

A warning icon next to the budget name indicates that one or more accounts are missing from the budget overall.

Warning icons beside individual rows identify specific unmapped accounts — accounts that exist in your bookkeeping but are not currently mapped within the budget.

These warnings are typically triggered by changes made to the chart of accounts in your connected accounting software, such as adding, deleting, or merging accounts.

Resolving Unmapped Accounts

Clicking any warning icon will open a pop-up window that guides you through the steps to resolve the issue. We recommend duplicating your budget to test the steps before applying the changes to the original budget. You have two options:

Option 1: Fix rows individually

Click on the warning icon near the row, or use the pencil icon to select and delete multiple affected rows, then add them back using the pop-up. This method gives you control over which rows to update.

Option 2: Reset the statement

The reset option rebuilds your profit and loss or balance sheet to match your current chart of accounts structure. This is the faster approach when multiple accounts have been added, deleted, or reorganized, and you want to bring the entire budget into alignment at once. Keep in mind that cell formulas and comments will not be carried over — see the section below for the full details of what is and is not preserved.

What Happens When You Reset

It is important to understand what is and what is not preserved when you reset the statement.

What is overwritten:

The statement structure is replaced with your current chart of accounts layout.
Cell formulas are not carried over.
Comments are not carried over.

What is preserved:

Row drivers remain in place.
Manually entered values (cells without formulas) are preserved. For example, if a row contains a manually entered value of $2,500, that value will still be there after the reset.

Warning Icons and the Account Mapping Tool

Warning icons can also appear if you are using the Account Mapping Tool with Budgets PRO. Specifically:

Budgets PRO created before the mapping tool was enabled will show warning icons for any accounts that have changed from the original chart of accounts structure.
Warning icons will also appear if you make changes to the chart of accounts structure within the mapping tool after a budget has already been created.

In both cases, the same two resolution options apply — reset the statement or fix rows individually. For full details on updating Budgets PRO after enabling or modifying the mapping tool, see Using the Mapping Tool with Budgets PRO.

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