What are the standard built-in categories?

Hello!

This is about FreeAgent’s built-in categories, not any income and spending categories added by the user.

I have three questions:

  1. How can I find all of an account’s categories, given that the categories endpoint doesn’t return them all? [1][2] Being able to query for a specific category only helps if you already know what it is, but I don’t know what I don’t know. It’s a Rumsfeldian known unknown; or rather an unknown known :slight_smile:

  2. How can I know which categories are associated with an explanation type such as Money Paid To User?

Currently I look for specific nominal codes which I obtained via inspecting the dropdowns in my own UK Ltd company FreeAgent account. However some of the categories will differ for, say, Sole Traders. So how can I know which categories are relevant for Sole Traders? Is there a definitive list publicly available?

Additionally/alternatively, is it safe to look for ranges of nominal codes? For example, for my account and Money Paid To User, the relevant nominal codes seem to be 900, 902, 904, 905, 907, and 908. Could I just look for codes between 900 and, say, 950?

Other Money In seems to need some nominal codes in the fifties, some in the high 600s, and 998. There’s no obvious range. How do I know which categories are relevant for a different type of FreeAgent account?

  1. Why do some category names differ from what is displayed in FreeAgent?

One of my DoubleAgent users is a Sole Trader. When he wants to explain a Money Paid To User transaction in FreeAgent, the options are “Drawings”, “Net Salary and Bonuses”, and “Expense Payment”.

However the categories from the API endpoint are named “Capital Account”, “Salary and Bonuses”, and “Expense Account”. Is the mapping of names documented anywhere? Or do I just have to guess?

Many thanks in advance,

Andy Stewart

[1] Categories missing in the full categories list
[2] Retrieve full categories, including ones whose nominal code have "-"

Hi Andrew,

You are right that only the top level accounts are returned from the categories endpoint at the moment.

You can download a CSV containing the full list from within the app itself, though this won’t be of use if you need to get the information from the API. Go to Accounting->Reports->Trial Balance and select “Chart Of Accounts CSV” from the Export Report dropdown.

We do have a feature request for this on our public API feature development board. If you upvote that issue, you should be notified of any changes we make regarding this issue - https://trello.com/c/ujTmgMpR/46-allow-retrieval-of-categories-with-sub-codes.

We don’t publish a mapping from the types specified in the banking forms to specific categories.

Regarding why the names in the form don’t always match the category name - they are describing the transaction rather than the account that the money goes into, so for example you have “Money Paid To User -> Drawings” and “Money Received from User -> Capital Introduced”. Again though we don’t publish this mapping via the API.

Finally we don’t make any guarantees about the ranges used for nominal codes, so while you might be able to spot some patterns (e.g. user accounts are in the range 900-910), we can’t guarantee that those will remain valid in future.

Sorry to not be able to be of more help.

Regards
Donal

Thank you for the detailed reply, Donal. It’s all helpful to know.

Yours,
Andrew