SparkReceipt Help

Pre-defined chart of accounts templates

Start your bookkeeping with a ready-made chart of accounts — IRS Schedule C, US Small Business, European VAT, Finnish Tilikartta, or the SparkReceipt default.

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Written by SparkReceipt TeamUpdated Sep 9, 2026

Setting up your expense and income categories from scratch is one of the slowest parts of starting a new bookkeeping account. SparkReceipt ships with a small set of curated chart-of-accounts templates that you can apply with one click, so a brand-new account can have a working category tree in seconds. Templates are a third option alongside building categories manually and importing your own file — pick whichever matches how you work.

Available templates

SparkReceipt currently offers five built-in templates:

  • IRS Schedule C — expense and income categories that line up with the IRS Schedule C form, intended for US sole proprietors and self-employed individuals. Each category carries its line number as the account code (L8 for Advertising, L24b for Meals, L9_parking_tolls for Parking and Tolls, and so on), so the Schedule C export maps them to lines automatically.
  • US Small Business — a broader chart of accounts for US small businesses with employees, organized by account type with common subcategories (payroll, occupancy, marketing, professional services, and so on).
  • European VAT Business — generic expense and income categories for European businesses operating under a VAT system. Country coverage includes most EU member states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland.
  • Finnish Chart of Accounts (Suomalainen tilikartta) — a standard Finnish small-business tilikartta with the categories and account-code ranges Finnish bookkeepers expect.
  • SparkReceipt Default — a simple, general-purpose set of expense and income categories suitable for personal use or basic business tracking. This is the fallback when nothing else fits, and it is also the template applied to brand-new accounts that haven't picked anything else.

Each template comes with category names, account codes, and a parent–child hierarchy where applicable. The "Preview" button on the import view shows the full tree before you apply.

How the recommendation works

When you open the template picker, SparkReceipt highlights one template as Recommended. The recommendation is based on what it knows about you:

  • Your country (derived from your timezone and locale, or set during onboarding)
  • Your tax system (e.g. VAT vs. a non-VAT default)
  • Your business size (sole proprietor, 2–10 employees, 11–50, 51+)
  • The use case you picked at signup (business, personal, job expenses, accountant)
  • Your industry, when you've shared it

Each template declares which of these signals it's intended for, and a score is computed against your profile. The template with the strongest match is shown as Recommended; the rest are still listed and can be applied just as easily. Country-specific templates are filtered out entirely when your country doesn't match — for example, a US user will not see the Finnish chart of accounts in the list.

If none of the country-specific templates match, the SparkReceipt Default is shown as a safe fallback so the picker is never empty.

For new users signing up, the recommended template is also pre-selected during onboarding so the account is usable immediately.

Applying a template (existing accounts)

Existing accounts are never modified automatically — your current categories stay exactly as they are until you decide to change them. To switch to a template, or to apply one on top of an account that started empty:

  1. Open Settings in the web app and go to the Categories tab.
  2. Click Import categories.
  3. Choose the Use a pre-defined chart of accounts option.
  4. Browse the list, optionally click Preview to see the full hierarchy, then click Apply template on the one you want.
  5. Confirm in the dialog that appears.

By default, applying a template adds its categories on top of what you already have, leaving your existing categories untouched. If you want to swap your chart of accounts wholesale, switch the Replace existing categories setting to Yes, remove old categories before applying. When you replace, SparkReceipt automatically re-categorizes documents whose books are still open into the matching new accounts; categories that are referenced by documents in closed periods are archived rather than deleted, so historical reports stay intact.

Applying or importing categories requires an admin or accountant role on the account.

What if none of the templates fit?

Templates are a starting point, not a constraint. After applying one you can rename, add, or delete categories freely from the Categories settings tab. If you have a custom chart of accounts from your accounting software or your own spreadsheet, use the file-upload path instead — see AI-based chart of accounts import for that workflow.