Cost centres
A cost centre is the accounting address a purchase is booked to inside your customer's company. Here it is real master data — a row you can validate against, own, restrict and budget — not a free-text field on a line.
04711 and 4711 are different values to
every downstream system), and who owns each one. The list comes out of their ERP.
It is theirs, not yours, and inventing values on their behalf guarantees an
invoice nobody can post.What a cost centre carries
Cost centres belong to an organization — the buying company. One company's
4711 has nothing to do with another's.
| Field | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Code | The value that travels to the order line and the invoice. Matches their ERP exactly |
| Name | What a buyer sees in the dropdown: Werkstatt Halle 2, not 4711 |
| Organization | The buying company it belongs to |
| Parent | The cost centre above it, for reporting roll-up |
| Owner | The contact who approves spend booked here |
| Deputies | Contacts who may decide in the owner's place, under their own name |
| Active | Whether it may still be chosen. Retire, never delete |
Codes are the load-bearing field. Everything else can be changed later without consequence; a code that does not match the ERP has to be fixed in every order that already carried it.
Hierarchy and roll-up
A cost centre may have a parent. 4711 Werkstatt Halle 2 and 4712 Werkstatt Halle 3 sit under 4700 Produktion, which sits under 4000 Technik.
The hierarchy is for reporting. Spend rolls up, so the head of production can see one number across both halls without anybody re-keying a mapping.
4700 Produktion is not a pool that
4711 and 4712 draw from. Each cost centre's budget is its own. If the
customer wants a shared departmental pot, model one cost centre and let both
halls book to it — do not build a parent budget and expect the children to
consume it.Keep the tree shallow. Three levels is plenty; five is a sign the customer has handed you their full controlling structure rather than the part that buys things. Only cost centres that people actually order against need to exist here.
Owner and deputies
The owner is who the cost centre's approvals go to. This matters more than it looks: for most mid-sized customers, "authority follows the budget" is the entire approval policy, and setting a good owner per cost centre removes the need for any other routing.
Deputies are the holiday plan. A deputy may decide anything the owner may decide, and the decision is recorded under the deputy's own name. That last part is the whole point — it is what separates a deputy from the shared login the customer is using today.
Give every cost centre at least one deputy. A cost centre whose owner is the only person who can decide is a cost centre that stops the department every August.
Restrictions: who may book to what
A cost centre can be restricted so it only appears where it belongs. Five restriction types, and they combine:
| Restriction | Example |
|---|---|
| Contact | Only the facility manager may book to KST-9100 Gebäude |
| Role | Only contacts with the approver role may use the capital-expenditure centre |
| Product | The spindle's cost centre is the machine's, always |
| Category | Everything under Arbeitsschutz books to safety, whoever orders it |
| Catalog | A punchout catalogue's lines book to the contract's cost centre |
Restrictions are evaluated per line, against that line's product, category, catalogue and price — so one cart can legitimately offer three cost centres on one line and exactly one on another. When exactly one is usable, it is selected automatically. Get the restrictions right and most buyers never touch the field.
Set them up
- Open the customer's organization and go to its cost centres in the Cost Centers app.
- Create one cost centre per code the customer gave you. Code and name first; leave the tree flat on the first pass.
- Set the parent on each child once the full list exists. Building the tree while creating rows produces orphans.
- Set an owner on every cost centre, and at least one deputy.
- Add restrictions only where the customer has a real rule. An unrestricted cost centre is available to everyone in the organization, which is usually correct for consumables.
- Add a budget where the customer wants the spend controlled, not on everything. A cost centre with no budget still allocates cost and still reports — it does not block.
Importing from the customer's ERP
For anything over about thirty cost centres, do not type them. Their controlling department can produce the list from their ERP in an afternoon. Two things to agree before the first import: the key is the code, so a re-import updates rather than duplicating; and their list changes, usually with the financial year, so plan a recurring sync from the start — see Field mapping and Build a workflow.
What to check
- Put two products from different categories in a cart as a buyer at that customer. Each line should offer only the cost centres that line is allowed, and a line with exactly one should fill itself in.
- Place a small test order and follow the cost centre through: it should reach the order line, and from there your ERP. Check the ERP, not only the Cockpit — that is where the mapping either works or does not.
- Ask the customer's controller to read the cost-centre list back to you. If a name means nothing to them, the buyer will not recognise it either.
Next
- Budgets — put an amount and a period on one.
- Approval rules — decide what happens when the money runs low.