account_type_selection

The account_type_selection widget is a specialized version of the standard selection widget used on exactly one field that matters: account_type on account.account. Instead of a flat dropdown of all account types, it renders a grouped menu with two section headers, Balance Sheet and Profit & Loss, and six groups underneath: Assets, Liabilities, Equity, Income, Expense and Other.

The grouping logic is simpler than it looks. The component takes the field's selection choices and filters them by string prefix on the stored value: everything starting with asset lands under Assets, liability under Liabilities, equity under Equity, income under Income, expense under Expense, and off_balance under Other. That is the whole algorithm; there is no configuration, no mapping table, and no option to change the buckets.

For finance teams, the grouped dropdown mirrors how a balance sheet and P&L are actually structured, which makes picking the right type during chart of accounts setup much less error prone. A bookkeeper choosing between Current Assets and Non-current Assets sees both under the Assets heading rather than scanning an alphabetical list.

The practical caveat appears when you customize. If a developer adds a new value to the account_type selection whose key does not start with one of the six recognized prefixes, the widget filters it out of every group and the value becomes unselectable from the UI even though it is perfectly valid at the ORM level. Records can still hold the value through imports or code, which produces the confusing situation of a type you can see on saved accounts but cannot pick.

<!-- The core usage on the account form (account module) -->
<field name="account_type" widget="account_type_selection"/>

<!-- The same widget works in the chart of accounts list view -->
<field name="account_type" widget="account_type_selection"/>

Because the prefixes are hardcoded, reusing the widget on your own selection field only produces a sensible result if your keys follow the same naming convention, for example asset_custom_pool lands under Assets purely because of its prefix.

In Odoo 16 through 18 the component overrode a hierarchyOptions getter that fed a native HTML select with optgroup style headers, and the Other group matched only the exact value off_balance. Odoo 19 rewrote it: the component now inherits the SelectMenu based template of the base selection widget and injects sections and groups arrays in setup(), and the Other group now matches by startsWith('off_balance') like every other bucket.

One inherited subtlety is worth knowing: the base selection widget hardcodes autosave: true when the view type is kanban, and in Odoo 19 its readonly label lookup crashes on a stored value that is no longer in the selection. Both behaviors pass straight through to this widget because the descriptor is spread unchanged.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026. The changes below are read from the public development branch and are not final until release.

The account_type_selection.js file on the development branch is byte-identical to the shipped Odoo 19 source at the time of writing: same sections, same prefix filters, no new options. Unless something lands before the release freeze, this page applies to Odoo 20 as is. We re-verify after the release.