Accounting Services has launched the Account Code Guide, a searchable list of revenue, expense values and descriptions, indicating recommended and commonly used values with a short definition, and noting restricted and budgetary only values.
The guide is located on this page: https://www.northwestern.edu/financial-operations/policies-procedures/reporting/guide-to-accounts.html
If you are working with a sponsored project chartstring, you will find that account codes available for use are limited to the ones nested under the award's opened roll-up accounts. You can find guidance with sponsored accounts by viewing the Office of Sponsored Research Account Code Tree: https://www.northwestern.edu/asrsp/expenses/account-codes.html
There are two Cognos reports that provide chart of accounts information located in Team Content > Finance Facilities and Research Administration > School > Budget/COA (security role required)
- GL067 – Valid Chartstrings (Designed for recharge groups to provide information about valid chartstrings (chartstrings with budget). Note that it does not indicate AVAILABLE budget. The report also provides Start and Stop Dates for projects, so that you can validate that the expense that you wish to charge to a chartstring falls within the valid period of the project)
- GE001 – Publish ChartField Data for Consumption by Other Systems (Contains a list of all valid chartfield values)