Flags cover the jobs an account advertises on its own record. Every other job the engine does — the debtors and creditors control accounts, the tax anchors your tax codes post through, the GRNI clearing account, customer deposits, purchase-price variance, marketplace fees, and more — is looked up in Account roles (System Setup → Accounts → Account roles): one list naming, for each role, the account in your chart that does that job.
Three rules keep this safe:
- The engine follows the role, never the code. You may renumber your accounts to a scheme of your own — the mapping follows the account itself, so nothing the engine posts changes.
- A role can be re-pointed but never left empty. If your chart puts a job on a different account, change it on the Account roles page. A posting that ever finds a role unmapped stops and names the role rather than guessing an account.
- A mapped account cannot be deleted while a role points at it — re-point the role first. The refusal names the role.
One more promise, here and everywhere an account is chosen: a dropdown always shows the account currently chosen, with its code and name — on this page, and on the account fields of customers, suppliers, banks and settings — even when that account sits outside the band of accounts the dropdown normally offers (an older chart can hold a control account the band does not reach, as the repair below describes). The band governs what you may newly pick; it never hides what a record already names, and saving a form without touching the field never changes it.
Your chart itself starts from a standard: one international Core, localized by country (Canada's GST/HST accounts and tax codes, for example) and shaped by industry (a manufacturer's factory accounts), assembled in the setup wizard's Chart of accounts step. The standard is maintained by your platform administrator (Platform → Chart templates); improvements they publish reach companies created afterwards — your company's chart, once born, is yours and never changes underneath you. Inside your company you may add accounts anywhere and renumber freely; the standard's numbering bands bind only the template, never your live chart.