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If you’ve ever inherited a chart of accounts with five segments, 14 digits, and thousands of near-identical combinations, you already know how this story starts. 

It usually starts with good intentions. 

A new program launchs. A funder needs separate reporting. An auditor asks for more detail. Someone says, “Let’s just add another segment.” So, they do. And then they do it again. And again. 

Before long, your chart of accounts wasn’t a chart anymore — it was a workaround. 

Meg Wilson knows this story well. Before joining Sparkrock, she was a nonprofit Director of Finance who led an ERP implementation firsthand. And part of what prompted that change was a chart of accounts that had ballooned to over 10,000 GL accounts — not because the finance team wanted complexity, but because the system forced them into it. 

And that leads to the truth most finance leaders don’t say out loud until they’ve felt the pain: 

If your reporting model depends on creating more GL accounts, your chart of accounts has stopped doing its job. 

When Control Becomes the Bottleneck 

Segmented charts of accounts are often defended as “tight” or “controlled.” And technically, that’s true. 

When every valid combination has to exist as a predefined account, the system forces compliance. If the account isn’t there, you can’t post to it. In theory, that sounds like governance. 

In reality, it often turns the chart of accounts into a brittle control mechanism — one that can only respond to change by getting bigger. 

Jennifer Hume has lived that tradeoff from both sides. She’s a designated accountant and former nonprofit Director of Finance, and today she works with finance leaders every day as a Pre-Sales Consultant at Sparkrock. 

“That level of control comes at the cost of flexibility,” she says. “Every new reporting requirement turns into account creation. And once you’ve built the structure, you’re stuck maintaining it, even when the organization changes.” 

What does that look like in practice? 

• Tens of thousands of accounts to maintain (and explain) 

• Budgets forced into detail you don’t actually manage — because the structure demands it 

• Reporting that depends on manual rollups and offline workarounds 

• Endless cleanup when coding isn’t consistent (because it never is) 

• Finance stuck as the reporting gatekeeper, instead of focusing on analysis and decision support 

And the pain compounds when something shifts. 

Need to split full-time and part-time salaries for audit? Add new grants mid-year? Introduce a new location? In a segmented GL, those aren’t “small changes.” They’re structural rebuilds, often requiring duplicated accounts, updated totals, and redesigned reports. 

Kinley Graham — former CIO at a nonprofit and now Director of Pre-Sales at Sparkrock — puts it bluntly: 

“I’ve watched organizations spend weeks rebuilding reports and account structures just to answer one new question. That’s not a reporting problem. That’s a data model problem.” 

The Moment Everything Breaks (or Finally Clicks) 

Most organizations don’t revisit their chart of accounts because it’s interesting. They revisit it because something makes the current setup impossible to defend. 

Jennifer describes the triggers she saw firsthand in the nonprofit world: 

• Funders asking for faster, more granular reporting 

• Multiple year-ends across different funding sources 

• Emergency requirements (like COVID reporting) with no warning 

• Boards wanting clarity now, not after finance rebuilds a report 

During the pandemic, Jennifer’s organization had to report every dollar related to COVID spending. Because they were working with dimensions, they created a COVID dimension, told the team what to use, and got on with the work. Peer organizations without that structure spent weeks combing through transactions line by line, trying to reconstruct the story after the fact. 

Same data. Very different outcomes. 

And that contrast tends to land in a very specific way: finance leaders stop debating whether the chart of accounts is the issue, — and start looking for a structure that can handle change without turning every new requirement into a rebuild. 

The Shift: From Encoding Meaning to Tagging It 

This is the shift Meg, Jennifer, and Kinley keep coming back to, because it’s the point where complexity stops compounding: 

Stop forcing meaning into the GL account. 
Start attaching meaning to the transaction. 

A dimensions-based chart of accounts makes that possible. 

Instead of trying to make the account number carry every detail about who, where, why, and for what purpose, you keep the chart of accounts focused on what it’s meant to represent: the nature of the financial activity. 

That’s why in a dimensional model, the chart itself stays small and stable — often 100–150 natural accounts that reflect accounting fundamentals: salaries, benefits, supplies, travel, contract services, revenue. 

Then you use dimensions to capture the operational context finance actually needs to report on: 

• Which fund? 

• Which department? 

• Which program? 

• Which location? 

• Which grant? 

• Which project or individual (when needed)? 

Now the transaction carries the story and reporting becomes retrieval, not reconstruction. 

The practical outcome is hard to ignore: organizations that once maintained 10,000+ GL accounts can operate with around 130 and still get more insight, because they’ve separated what the account is from what the transaction means. 

How Finance Leaders Actually Clean Up the Chart of Accounts 

This is where most conversations stop: at the idea. 

But finance leaders know the real work isn’t deciding to clean up the chart of accounts. It’s deciding how to do it without breaking reporting, controls, or trust in the numbers. 

Here’s what that process actually looks like in practice. 

1. Start With Reporting Pain, Not Structure 

The most common mistake teams make is redesigning the chart of accounts in isolation. 

Experienced finance leaders start somewhere else entirely — with the moments that consistently fail them. 

They ask: 

• Which reports do we rebuild over and over? 

• Where do audits slow us down or raise questions? 

• Which questions take days to answer when they should take minutes? 

• Where do funders or boards push back because the story isn’t clear? 

Those answers surface the real requirements. They tell you what needs to be visible, controllable, and defensible. 

As Kinley often advises customers: 

“If a dimension doesn’t answer a recurring question, it doesn’t belong.” 

2. Separate “Always Required” From “Sometimes Useful” 

One of the biggest advantages of dimensions is that not every transaction needs the same level of context. 

Finance leaders make this distinction early: 

• Fund and department may be mandatory 

• Project, grant, or individual may be situational 

• Temporary initiatives (like COVID) should never permanently alter the chart 

Jennifer shared how her organization started with just three dimensions and added others over time as reporting needs evolved. They didn’t try to anticipate every future requirement. They focused on what mattered now, and designed for change later. 

That discipline matters. It prevents dimension sprawl while preserving flexibility, and it keeps the structure usable for the long haul. 

3. Design Dimensions for Governance, Not Just Reporting 

Dimensions are often introduced as a reporting tool. That undersells their real value. 

Well-designed dimensions become the backbone of governance. 

Finance leaders use them to: 

• Route approvals to the right people 

• Enforce spending limits consistently 

• Control who can see what 

• Tie budget ownership to real accountability 

This is where structure replaces manual oversight. 

Instead of finance reviewing transactions “just in case,” the rules are built into the system. Controls are applied consistently. Exceptions are visible. 

Meg often describes this as the shift from reactive finance — fixing issues after the fact — to designed governance, where the structure does the work. 

4. Simplify the Experience for Non-Finance Users 

A clean chart of accounts only works if people can actually use it correctly. 

That’s why finance leaders focus just as much on how transactions are coded as on how data is reported. 

Sparkrock supports this with tools like Account Sets — predefined, approved combinations of accounts and dimensions that remove guesswork and reduce miscoding. 

Program managers don’t need to understand accounting logic. They need to select something that makes sense to them and trust that finance has already defined what’s allowed. 

That’s what makes cleanup stick. 
Not documentation. Not training decks. 
But a structure that guides good decisions by default. 

What Changes Once the Cleanup Is Done 

When the chart of accounts is no longer carrying more meaning than it was designed to hold, the change shows up quickly — and not just in reporting. 

The work of finance shifts. 

Reporting Without Reconstruction 

Once meaning lives in dimensions instead of account numbers, reporting stops being an exercise in rebuilding. 

Finance leaders can filter, slice, and drill down across funds, programs, locations, or grants without creating new reports every time someone asks a slightly different question. Program-level expenses across multiple locations? A few filters. Grant activity across departments? Already there. 

The difference is subtle but profound: reporting becomes retrieval, not reconstruction. 

Budgets That Reflect Reality 

In a segmented GL, budgeting often mirrors the chart and not the way the organization actually manages money. Finance teams end up budgeting at extreme levels of detail simply because the structure demands it. 

With dimensions, budgets can be set where accountability actually lives. 

Finance leaders can: 

• Budget at a higher level and roll up intelligently 

• Compare actuals to budget across meaningful dimensions 

• Reforecast without reworking the entire structure 

Variance analysis becomes clearer, and budget owners can see what they’re responsible for without finance translating the numbers. 

Governance That Scales 

Dimensions improve visibility and enable control. 

Approval workflows, spending limits, and access rules can be tied directly to dimensions — departments, funds, programs — instead of hard-coded account strings. 

That means governance scales as the organization grows or changes. New programs don’t require structural overhauls. New grants don’t introduce exceptions that live only in someone’s head. 

Control moves out of brittle account structures and into intentional, auditable rules. 

Fewer Errors, Better Audits 

When coding relies less on memorized strings and more on structured context, errors drop, and so does cleanup. 

Consistent tagging reduces miscoding. Adjusting entries become the exception instead of the norm. Auditors get clearer, more defensible data without weeks of explanation. 

Finance spends less time justifying numbers and more time standing behind them. 

And maybe most importantly: 

Finance Stops Being the Bottleneck 

This is the change finance leaders feel most. 

Program leaders gain visibility into their numbers. Managers understand how their decisions show up financially. Questions get answered without everything routing back through finance. 

And finance’s role shifts back to where it belongs, as a partner in planning, oversight, and stewardship, not the department of “no,” “not yet,” or “we’ll get back to you after we rebuild the report.” 

Where Sparkrock Fits In 

Sparkrock didn’t arrive at this model by mistake. It came from lived experience — from people like Meg, Jennifer, and Kinley who have sat on both sides of the table. 

That’s why Sparkrock combines: 

• A logical chart of accounts that stays stable over time 

• Flexible, purpose-built dimensions that capture the context finance actually reports on 

• Tools like Account Sets to reduce coding errors, eliminate guesswork, and make the structure usable outside the finance team 

• Reporting built for finance leadership, not just compliance outputs 

The result is a system designed around how nonprofits and public sector organizations actually operate: changing programs, evolving funding requirements, real governance needs, and limited time to clean up after messy data. 

The technology matters. But what makes it work is the operating philosophy behind it: keep the chart clean, keep context flexible, and design for control without creating complexity. 

The Real Takeaway 

A massive chart of accounts isn’t a badge of sophistication. 
It’s usually a signal that your system is asking the wrong thing of finance. 

Dimensions don’t simplify accounting because they’re trendy. 
They simplify it because they separate structure from meaning — and let each do its job well. 

For finance leaders who are tired of rebuilding, explaining, and compensating for structural limits, that shift isn’t incremental. 

It’s foundational. 

Want to hear how finance leaders think through dimension strategy in the real world? Watch our thought leadership webinar, Dimensions in Practice: A Conversation for Finance Leaders, featuring Meg Wilson, Jennifer Hume, and Kinley Graham. They walk through practical examples, common pitfalls, and what “good” actually looks like when you’re designing for reporting, budgeting, and governance.