Chart Of Accounts - Do we have to use IFS COA or can we use our current ones?

Most customers use their existing CoA when moving to IFS, but with amendments. You don’t need to use IFS CoA. Here are some points relating to CoA in implementations:

1. Companies use the implementation as an opportunity to clean up their CoA 
2. There are a couple of IFS-specific accounts we require due to the way IFS works (supplier preliminary cost posting is one account example but there are a few others)
3. IFS works best without many “in error” or “dummy” accounts, which other systems use to post issues to, and later allocate out. IFS is more design to catch issues as they occur and fix then without posting to dummy accounts first
4. Often, if you move from a system that doesn’t support multi-dimension CoA, the existing list of accounts contain a lot of detail that typically moves to other dimensions in IFS. Again, it’s a reason to cleanse the accounts but not to use IFS ones.

The only reason for using IFS CoA would be because you need to re-create all posting controls but it’s advisable to do that to learn how they work and to ensure you get the reporting you require. It might seem like a lot more work but it’s always worth it from my consulting experience

Thank you IRituma, how hard/complicated would be to use our current COA, and are there significant cost differences in implementing one over the other?

Hi,

That is very difficult to say. I wouldn’t expect there to be significant cost differences but can depend largely on the resource and time available from the finance team internally.

From my consulting experience, best results would be to delete the entire posting control setup and re-create these with your CoA (while keeping another company with the standard setup to look back on and compare). This will be the majority of the work . The implementation cost will depend on how much support from consultants is required to set these up after a few initial sessions. 

Posting control is really at the heart of the financial setup so I would advise reviewing the setup and learning how it works to be able to make changes going forward also after go-live in case new requirements appear.

IRituma, thank you I very much appreciate this

we are new to IFS and went with Cloud, but it appears that it is fairly new for IFS. We have had more hiccups than anticipated due to learning curve from IFS and implementation consultants

We are on APPs9 looking to upgrade to Cloud in the future and have been using IFS for over 10+ years. When we create a new company we use our own COA (ie: copy from an existing company vs using IFS standard template). We also created our own Account Types and Account Groups that matched our reporting requirements.      There isn’t a MASTER COA page in this version, they are company specific,  but never heard of having to use IFS default accounts. They just have company templates set up (ie: US, Standard, UK, etc) to assist with initial set up of your first company but you can delete the links to posting controls and then delete the accounts and create new ones. to match your structure. (as long as no entries have been made to date this should be possible) Then re-map your posting controls to your accounts. May be a little time consuming if you do not have a migration tool but In our version you can right click to copy object/paste object (similar to excel) so it’s easy to copy from a test environment to prod or between companies if need be. Hopefully that is still a feature in Cloud!     I agree with leva that it’s important to understand posting controls from a Financial perspective so good exercise to go through even though a little time consuming.     Good Luck!