A year ago, we kicked off the Summer of Killing Parsing with Custom Chart of Accounts: the idea that your COA isn’t an afterthought, it’s your financial DNA. It’s how every dollar Archer parses gets mapped to the way your team sees a deal. Your categories, your granularity, your language. Get the COA right and every parse, every analytic, every comp downstream arrives pre-translated into how you think.
Since then, Custom COA has become one of the most-used capabilities on the platform, and one of the most consequential. Our parsing engine was trained across 130,000+ unique financial line items, and the COA is where all of that intelligence gets bent to your will. Lenders and debt brokers toggle between Fannie, Freddie, and balance-sheet COAs on the same property. Acquisitions and asset management run different structures off the same parse.
Which meant the editor itself, the place where you actually shape that DNA, deserved to be a lot better than it was. Today it is.
The new COA editor is a two-panel workspace built around how COA work actually happens: your structure on one side, the lines you’re working on the other, everything visible at once, with bulk actions and a far more intuitive setup process. No more editing one line at a time and holding the rest of the tree in your head.
Build roll-ups so line items ladder into the summary categories your IC memos and lender packages actually use. Combine lines that should never have been separate. Rename, move, reorganize, and undo when you change your mind, because on COA work, everyone changes their mind. The editor is built for the messy middle of the job, not just the final state.
Here’s the part we sweated most. COA changes ripple through parsing, analytics, and comps. So the new editor treats publishing with the seriousness it deserves: a review banner summarizes exactly what’s changing, and publish gating means nothing takes effect until you’ve looked it over and confirmed.
The practical effect: you can experiment freely. Restructure boldly, try the reorganization you’ve been putting off, undo half of it, and commit only when it’s right. The safety net is the feature.
If your COA has drifted (legacy lines nobody remembers creating, expenses bucketed “for now” eight months ago, a structure inherited from a spreadsheet that predates half your team), this is the week to fix it. An hour in the new editor pays for itself on every deal you parse afterward, because everything downstream of the parse inherits the structure.
And this remains true: if you want a second set of eyes on a restructure, ask us. Our team of US-based CRE professionals genuinely enjoys COA work, which we recognize says something about us.
Live now under [Settings → Chart of Accounts].
Does editing my COA change deals I’ve already parsed? Updates apply instantly to everything you parse going forward. For existing deals, refresh the deal with your updated COA and it re-maps to the new structure, so you can bring your history along whenever you’re ready.
Can I still run multiple COAs? Yes. Multiple Custom COAs for different teams and stakeholders work exactly as before. The new editor makes each of them easier to build and maintain.
I’m on BYOM. Does this apply to me? Yes. Your COA still governs how parsed financials map before they flow into your model.