The parent/child accounts won't actually be linked to each other in Maintain Chart of Accounts. But if you number them correctly you can use the account rollup feature in the financial statement designer. The account rollup works by combing accounts into one line when a chosen number of characters in the account number match. For example, if the parent account for inventory is 12000 you could set up accounts 12010 and 12020 under it. Then you could use a rollup mask of 123** to combine all three accounts into one line.  It will use the name of the first account in the rollup range as description on that line.

There's too much to explain here. I've copied some instructions from a knowledgebase article below. It uses the income statement in its example but it works the same for the balance sheet. If you haven't customized financial statements in Sage 50 before you should also look up "Rollup Masking" in the help. it will explain how the rollup works and links to further instructions on how to customize the financial statements. It's not difficult. Feel free to post followup questions.

If you decide it's not something you want to do yourself, you can contact me directly at 918-851-9713 or [email protected] and I can give you a quote on customizing the financial statements for you.

These instructions are copied from knowledgebase article 31111. They

1. Select Reports, Financial Statements. Highlight the <Standard> Income Stmnt and click the Design button.
2. Locate the Line Description button that corresponds to the section of your Income Statement that you want to rollup (in our example we are going to modify the Income section).
3. Right-click the Line Description button you have selected.
4. Select Properties.
5. In the lower right, select Rollup from the Print field drop-down list.
   Note: If you do not see Rollup in the drop-down list, use the down arrow on your keyboard to find it.
6. In the Rollup Mask field, type the leading digit(s) that represent the account group you are rolling up (income accounts for example) and type zeros for the rest of the digits (as place holders) until you get to the department code. Then type asterisks for the department code. For example: You are interested in rolling up income accounts for all departments. Your income accounts begin with the number 4 and there are a total of 5 digits in each regular General Ledger account number. The department code consists of a dash and one character as the last digit. If you create a Rollup Mask using this criteria the rollup mask would be 40000**.

Note: if you want to change the name of the rollup instead of it just saying the first account ID, change it from ROLLUP in line 5 to "summary" and change the text. It will now roll up with the new text.