Each month, your accountant receives a list of your business’s card purchases and account transactions. They then need to review the transactions one by one: what was purchased, which account a transaction belongs to, and whether an expense or income should be assigned to a specific team or project.
As your business grows, so does the number of transactions. More company cards, multiple projects, different teams – and then one day, it’s hard to understand where your money is actually going.
In Holvi, you can now assign chart of accounts categories and cost centres to your transactions in the same place you manage your payments. This eases bookkeeping, while giving you better visibility into your business expenses, income and profitability.
A chart of accounts (COA) tells your bookkeeping system what was bought or sold. It’s a list of categories used in accounting to organize your business income and expenses.
Example COA categories:
Once you assign each transaction to the correct accounting category, your accountant doesn’t have to sort it out later. Instead, the accounting entry instantly tells them which items your business purchased and the categories they belong to.
In Holvi, you can build a chart of accounts yourself. You can:
Tip: Ask your accountant for a list of accounts they currently use for bookkeeping and use it to build your chart of accounts.
A cost centre tells you which team, project or business area a transaction belongs to.
Examples of cost centres:
Cost centres can be used for income as well as expenses. For example, if you want to track the profitability of a specific project, you can assign that project’s income and expenses to the same cost centre.
This makes it easier to see:
In Holvi, you can assign cost centres to your card transactions, so the information is automatically transferred to your bookkeeping export without any manual sorting.
Chart of accounts (COA) categories and cost centres solve different problems:
Chart of accounts = What happened?
→ For example: a software purchase
Cost centre = Who does the transaction belong to?
→ For example: to the marketing team
Together, the chart of accounts and cost centre give you a clear picture of how money moves through your business.
For example, in Holvi you could instantly see that marketing spent €3,000 on software last month, while sales spent €1,500 on travel expenses. These insights help you make better business decisions.
Your accountant will also thank you. They’ll receive ready-to-go, neatly structured data instead of having to manually review a long list of transactions. That saves time — and can reduce your bookkeeping costs.
Setting up cost centres and categories in Holvi doesn’t require any additional technical expertise or systems. It only takes a few minutes and just four steps.
1. Go to category management: Click “BOOKKEEPING” on the left, then select “Category management”.
2. Add a category: Click “ADD NEW”.
3. Fill in the category details: You can enter the following information:
Click “ADD” to create the category. It will be available for use immediately.
Click on a transaction in the account. Navigate to “Invoice Breakdown" and select the desired Category (chart of accounts) and Cost centre.
You can easily export all your data to your accounting software, including cost centres and the chart of accounts. Click the “Reports” button on the left, scroll down to the “Export Files” section, and download a ready-made export file compatible with your accounting software.
Below are three common situations related to managing team and project expenses, and how Holvi helps solve them.
Create a cost centre for each team in Holvi and assign transactions accordingly. At the end of the month, you’ll see each team’s purchases at a glance.
For example, marketing may have spent €3,000 while sales spent €1,500.
You can use cost centres as project codes in Holvi. Assign each expense and income transaction to the correct project.
Now it’s easy to see which projects stay within budget.
Set up your chart of accounts in Holvi to match your accounting software and add cost centres as well.
Holvi exports include categories, VAT information and cost centres. The file is compatible with tools like Netvisor, which makes your month-end routine faster. You’ll have one ready-to-go file instead of having to maintain extra spreadsheets for your accountant.
Tip: If you no longer have a use for certain categories, you can always archive them.
Cost centres and charts of accounts are now available directly in Holvi — no separate tools or spreadsheets needed.
Using both, you’ll get a clearer view of:
And your accountant will have fewer questions at the end of the month.
Cost centres and charts of accounts are available in all Holvi plans.
👉 You can find detailed setup instructions in our Help Center.