Purchasing

Account Codes

An account code is a five-digit chartfield value, part of USF’s General Ledger, used to indicate the nature of the transaction being processed.  
The first number of the account code groups the transactions into categories for:  

• Budget (8)
• Transfers (7)
• Expenditures (5 or 6)
• Revenue (4) 
• Equity (3)
• Liability (2)
• Assets (1).                                                                                           

In Procurement, expenditure accounts starting with either 5 (operating expenses) or 6 (non-operating) are the most used. Expenditure accounts are associated with both a Commodity Code, which is a separate 10- digit code developed by procurement and assigned by the purchaser that describes the item or service being purchased (See Commodity to Account Code Mapping) and a Budget Account for reporting purposes.  

The relationship looks like this: 

Item/Service --> Commodity Code --> Account Code (part of chartfield string) --> Budget Code

The correct use of a Commodity Code and Account Code are important in determining if the purchase is allowable from the chartfield provided.  The BMP system will run an automated budget check and return any requests that are in error for “No Budget Exists”.  

Different ledgers use different mapping of expenditure accounts to budget accounts. The Rosetta Stone is a guide for the budgetary roll up for sponsored research funds. Other maps are available through Resource Management & Analysis.