[zie]

In a general sense, it really doesn't matter, as long as you are consistent.

That said, there are accounting standards that define the general set of accounts for a particular industry, etc.

But every person having a set of books will want to customize it to some degree.

For instance in a personal set of books, if you want to track every person you pay, you might have accounts, 1 for every single person you have ever paid, ever.

That obviously can get pretty big! Others might not care that their electricity provider changed from Tootie inc. to Turtle inc, so they just have Utilities:Electricity as their account name.

Others might not care at all, and just have a very general "Expenses" account for things like that.

Make sense?

The important part is consistency of using the same accounts for the same transactions.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

OK So it is somewhat open but you could use a set of standard accounts, I see.

Makes sense. Probably it's important to keep somewhat of a registers of accounts available to avoid making mistakes and to write directions on where things should go

[tomnipotent]

There's also GAAP in the US and IFRS in Europe, which are standards for how certain things need to be done to be compliant. It's not specific about things like account names or how your ledger should be structured, but outlines many expectations and rules/constraints that build confidence in the resulting numbers.

[zie]

Agreed, but every industry/sector might have their own set of standards that usually are overlays on top of GAAP/etc. For example in the US for state and local governments there is GASB: https://gasb.org

[zie]

Of course! There is a standard term for that: Chart of Accounts

If you search for example chart of accounts <INDUSTRY YOU CARE ABOUT> you can probably get a sample set to work from.