Finance › GL Groups holds the headings of your chart of accounts. Every GL account sits under one group, and every group belongs to one of five classes — Assets, Liabilities, Equity, Income, Expense. The class decides where the group's accounts land on the Trial Balance, P & L and Balance Sheet.
Steps
- Go to Finance › GL Groups. The list shows Group Name, Account Class, Status, and who created or changed each group.
- Press Create. Type a Group Name, pick an Account Class, choose Active or Inactive, press Save. Save stays disabled until a class is chosen.
- Pencil icon = Update (same three fields). Eye icon = View (ID, name, class, parent, status, dates and users). Bin icon = delete, after a confirm prompt.
- Then add accounts under the group on Finance › GL Accounts.
Rules you will meet
- A name is unique within its class. "Mess" can exist once under Income and once under Expense, but not twice under Expense.
- System‑defined groups cannot be touched. The eleven groups every school is provisioned with (Current Assets, Payroll Expenses and friends) show a yellow warning on Update, their fields are greyed, and Save is disabled; the server refuses rename, re‑class, deactivate and delete for them. Create a new group instead of reshaping these.
- A group that already has accounts keeps its class. You can still rename it or switch Active/Inactive, but the Account Class dropdown is disabled with "This group has N linked accounts…". Moving a group to another class would silently re‑file every account under it — and all their history — on your reports.
- A group with accounts cannot be deleted — you get "Cannot delete GL Group. It has associated accounts." Move or delete the accounts first (accounts with transactions cannot be deleted at all).
Why Inactive matters more than it looks
An inactive group does not just grey out. Its whole set of accounts disappears from the Chart of Accounts, from the account dropdown on Journal Entry / Add Expense / Add Other Income, and from the salary payment dropdowns. If a clerk says "the account is gone" or "the salary account list is empty", check here first: the group is probably Inactive. Set it back to Active on Update — the accounts return at once, nothing was deleted.
Who can use it
The screen follows the Finance → Finance Groups privilege in Admin › Users & Privileges; Create is greyed out for a user without it.