Does your senior living organization’s chart of accounts list need its own table of contents? If you’re sheepishly nodding right now, don’t worry. You’re in good company.
We have a story you can probably relate to (but maybe don’t want to admit out loud). We once had a client who kept four separate accounts just to pay the same electric bill. Four more for office supplies. Four more for every other everyday expense. Their chart of accounts list was a 10-digit relic from the early 2000s. It was three segments deep and about a million pages long. It looked less like a financial tool and more like something you’d expect to flip through, not analyze. Every new account added meant another code to memorize and another column to maintain.
Since their accounting system couldn’t keep up, they did what so many finance teams still do: manage the whole thing in Excel. Think tabs on tabs on tabs, formulas on formulas on formulas. Every month-end close felt like assembling a 1,000-piece puzzle with missing corners, and surprisingly, even in today’s world, this isn’t uncommon: Spreadsheets remain the dominant tool for FP&A professionals, with 96% using them for planning and 93% using them for reporting purposes on a daily or weekly basis.
This is where the story gets good. When we sat down together with this client, our team asked the controller three questions that changed everything:
- Do you really need every segment, or can location and department be tracked with dimensions instead?
- How many of those codes actually show up in your reports?
- Will this structure scale when you add a new building or service line?
Their silence said it all. That chart had been built for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. A world where “growth” meant adding more digits, not more insight.
When the Chart Runs the Show
If your organization’s chart of accounts list feels like a legacy artifact, we can help. Most senior living finance teams inherited 10-digit, 3-segment structures that were designed for accounting software from the 1990s, and for years, those structures worked fine… until they didn’t.
As soon as a new location or program comes online, the chart balloons. What started as a tidy ledger turns into a maze of redundant codes and never-ending maintenance. Reports take forever to pull and are almost impossible to read. Instead of helping you understand your organization, your chart ends up running your organization, and not in a good way.
Rethinking the Structure
You don’t need to expand your chart every time your organization grows. You need to rethink how it’s built. Over 70% of organizations say that reducing the number of GL accounts and enabling multi-dimensional tagging was the primary reason for migrating to a new finance system in 2025, with dimensional accounting cited as a top feature. Turns out cleaner really is smarter.
With Sage Intacct’s dimensional accounting, you can simplify your structure while gaining more visibility. Instead of creating separate accounts for each department or location, you keep one account for each type of expense, then tag it by dimension. Office supplies become one account, tracked across every community or service line. Utilities stay on one account, split cleanly by department.
When we helped that controller rebuild their chart with dimensions, the change was immediate. The clutter vanished. Reports became readable. The controller laughed and said, “I can finally read this without flipping through a binder.” It was the kind of transformation that feels small on paper but huge in practice.
Simpler, Smarter, and Built for Growth
Dimensions enable automated transaction coding and allocation, as well as streamlined reporting. A dimensional chart isn’t just easier on the eyes. It’s easier on your entire finance team, with 73% of finance leaders observing improved retention of skilled employees after implementing AI and automation tools
Manual work drops dramatically. Reporting gets faster and more flexible, and when you add a new building, department, or funding source, you don’t need to start over. You just tag and go. Everyone works from the same clean structure. No duplicate codes, no mystery accounts, no wasted hours trying to remember which segment goes where. With dimensions like those in Sage Intacct, your chart finally matches how your organization actually runs, not how it used to run decades ago.
Time to Let the Old Structure Go
If your chart of accounts list still dictates how you work instead of supporting how you operate, it’s time for an upgrade. An upgrade like a modern, dimensional structure that gives you back control, and is clear, scalable, and built for growth.
Senior living finance teams don’t need more codes. They need more clarity. Not sure where to start? We’ll walk you through how to simplify your chart without losing an ounce of visibility. Just shoot our Sage Intacct experts a message or give us a call.
