Object Codes are a standardized classification that identifies the goods or services obtained as the result of a financial transaction — an expenditure or a revenue. They answer the questions "What did we buy?" or "Where did this money come from?"
Where a fund account answers which purpose or program the money belongs to (Athletics, Band, Class of 2026), an object code answers what kind of good or service the transaction was for (supplies, equipment, fees, field trips, and so on).
Why schools use object codes
Many districts already track object codes in a prior financial system, or require them for board and state reporting. Object codes let bookkeepers:
Group spending and revenue by category of good/service, across every fund
Roll the same purchase type up district-wide even when individual schools use different fund numbers
Keep a consistent vocabulary for "supplies vs. equipment vs. services" whether the money came from Football, Band, or the General fund
Where Object Codes live in Settings
Open Settings → Object Codes. It sits in the account-setup cluster with:
Account Setup (chart of accounts structure — fund/sub-account segments)
Account Groups (number ranges for report categories)
Fund Accounts (the individual funds at your school)
Bank Accounts (the money at the financial institution)
District toggle. Transaction screens only require (or offer) object codes when the district has turned them on under Settings → System → Enable Object Codes. The Object Codes list can still be configured here even when that toggle is off. See System Settings.
What you see on the Object Codes page
The page lists every object code available to staff when recording transactions:
+ New Object Code — add a code
Search by code or description… — filter the list
Columns:
Code — the object-code number (for example `50001`)
Description — the plain-language name (Supplies, Equipment, Field Trip)
Type — the classification of the code. Common types include Expenditure and Revenue
Status — Active or inactive
Actions — edit the row
Object Codes vs. Fund Accounts
These two labels often get mixed up. Keep them separate:
Fund account — the program bucket money lives in (Football, Band, Math Club). Managed under Fund Accounts and shaped by Account Setup / Account Groups.
Object code — the type of good or service the transaction is for (supplies, equipment, fees). Independent of which fund paid for it.
A single purchase almost always has both: one fund account and one object code. Example: buying volleyballs for the varsity team might post against Fund 1120 (Volleyball) with object code 50001 Supplies or 80001 Equipment.
How object codes show up in transactions
Once Enable Object Codes is on for the district and this school’s list is set up, booking a receipt, invoice, or disbursement can include selecting the object code that best describes the money movement. That value then flows into reports so you can answer both:
How much did the Volleyball fund spend this month? (fund lens)
How much did the school spend on equipment overall? (object lens)
District-defined codes. Code numbers, descriptions, and types are district-configured. If your district carried object codes forward from a prior system, coordinate retention of those codes during deployment — the same decision pattern used for other district-defined lists in Accounting.