Cost centres and budgets

A cost centre is the accounting bucket a purchase is charged to inside the customer's company. Carrying it correctly is what lets their finance team book an invoice without opening it.

Why it belongs on the line

One delivery routinely covers three departments: consumables for the workshop, a tool for maintenance, safety equipment for the warehouse. If the cost centre is a property of the order, the customer's accounts payable team splits the invoice by hand every time, which is exactly the manual work the shop was supposed to remove.

So the cost centre sits on the line. An order can carry three different cost centres across its positions, and each line arrives at the customer's accounting system already allocated.

How the value travels

1. The buyer sets a cost centre on an item in an order list, the saved, repeating list of things a site orders.
2. The list is turned into an order.
3. The value lands on the order position's own cost-centre field.
4. The order's page under Orders shows it as a chip on the line, so anyone looking at the order can see the allocation.
5. It goes out with the order to the ERP or the invoice, through your integration.

The last step is the one that matters and the one nobody checks until an invoice is wrong. Confirm the field is actually mapped in your order export.

Set it up for a customer

There is no screen where you define a customer's cost centres, because there is no master-data entity for them. What you can do:

1. Get the list of valid values from the customer, in writing.
2. Agree the exact format: leading zeros, prefixes, separators. 04711 and 4711 are two different values as far as any downstream system is concerned.
3. Have the customer's people put the value on their order-list items, so a repeating order carries it automatically instead of being retyped.
4. Map the order-line cost centre into your order export.
5. Check the first real invoice against the customer's expectation, line by line.

What a real budget would need

Customers ask for budgets. Be able to say precisely what that means, because it is a much larger thing than a field:

• Cost-centre master data — a defined list per customer, so a value can be validated rather than typed.
• An amount and a period — €50,000 for the maintenance cost centre in 2026.
• A consumption ledger — every order line that charged against it, with a running total.
• A decision at checkout — warn, or refuse, when the line would exceed what is left.
• Reversal handling — restore the budget when an order is cancelled, adjust it when a partial delivery is invoiced short, and do not double-count when a return comes back.

The last two are where budget features get hard. Anything that decrements a number when an order is placed also has to be correct through the whole order lifecycle, including partial deliveries and returns.

Cost-centre master data and budget enforcement are tracked work; neither has shipped. If a customer's decision to buy depends on them, raise it as a requirement rather than working around it.

Where the customer's own approval fits

Cost centres allocate; they do not authorise. The question "may this person spend this much" is separate and is answered by role and approval limit. See Approval rules.

What to check

• Place a test order with a cost centre on one line and not on another.
• Open the order under Orders. The line with a cost centre shows it as a chip; the other does not.
• Check the order as it arrives in the ERP, not only in the Cockpit. That is where the mapping either works or does not.

Next

• Approval rules — who may authorise the spend.
• How procurement governance works — the whole picture.