Cost centers are used to control your costs in internal accounting. A cost center is an area in your company where costs are incurred or services are rendered. Each cost center is represented by a unique number. Since you use cost centers only for internal accounting, they are not subject to legal requirements and you can structure them as you wish.
Typical criteria for structuring cost centers are:
-
Function: Your cost centers can be based on your company’s departments, such as sales, warehouse, and administration.
-
Location: Different branches or buildings can be defined as separate cost centers.
-
Project: Large projects can receive their own cost centers so that you can quickly track the costs of the project.
In Xentral, you can store cost centers in products, receipts (including liabilities), and in the incoming payment.
Xentral exports cost centers as a separate column when exporting invoices and liabilities in the financial accounting export. In receipts, you can display the cost center via the variable {KOSTENSTELLE} in the corresponding Text templates in receipts.
Important
The Cost centers module is only available if you use Xentral in the Pro plan.
You can find further information on Xentral plans on our website.
You can structure your cost centers as you wish; however, we recommend that you build a logical structure for all your cost centers (also called a cost center plan) based on the following points:
-
Hierarchical: The first digits of your cost center should be kept general and then become more specific with further digits. For example, you can assign the first digits to your branches, the following to your departments, and so on.
-
Expandable: Usually, you should provide about 2-3 digits per piece of information so that you can expand the information if necessary (e.g., due to new branches or departments) or to make the cost centers more specific in the future (the general HR department is split into administration and talent acquisition).
-
Appropriate: The more cost centers you have, the more precise the control over your costs becomes. At the same time, it makes accounting more complex and increases the administrative effort. In general, smaller companies should have fewer cost centers than a large company.
Note
Note that every company is different and has different requirements depending on the industry, location, and organizational structure. Please check the cost structure and requirements of your company before you implement cost centers.
Creating new cost centers in the Cost centers module. There you can also find an overview of all your cost centers in a searchable table.
Creating a new cost center:
-
Use the Smart Search to open the Cost centers module.
-
Click on + NEW at the top right.
-
Enter the Number of your cost center. Ideally, you have already created a cost center plan and only need to enter the number.
Note
To export your cost center to DATEV, you may only enter certain characters in the Number field. You can use both digits and letters; however, special characters such as * and & or umlauts such as ä and ü are not permitted.
You can use cost centers that contain only digits, only letters, or a combination of both. It does not matter whether you use uppercase or lowercase.
To avoid errors, you should decide on one type of number, e.g., all your cost centers use only digits. You should also talk to your tax consultant about whether your cost centers are compatible with your company and other software that you use.
-
In the Designation field, enter a meaningful description of the cost center, e.g., Sales DACH. This helps you to remember the purpose of the cost center. You can search for the designation in the overview. Xentral also displays it when you assign the cost center to a product, receipt, or liability.
-
Optional: Enter further internal information about the cost center in the Internal comment field. For example, you can describe the purpose of the cost center in more detail or explain the structure of the number. Xentral only displays this information when you edit the corresponding cost center in the Cost centers module.
-
Click on Save.
Xentral displays the message The data has been saved!. Click on the Back arrow icon to return to the cost center overview.
Adding new cost centers to change your cost centers and your cost center plan at any time. You can also edit existing cost centers by clicking on the pencil icon or delete cost centers by clicking on the X icon.
Tip
Before you delete a cost center or make other major changes, you should download a backup copy of the existing cost centers. To do this, click on Tools above the overview table on the right and use one of the options CSV, Excel, or PDF to download the data in the desired format.
Adding cost centers to receipts by either assigning cost centers to products or by adding a cost center directly to an individual receipt. Both procedures are explained in the following chapters.
When assigning a cost center to a product, the cost center is applied to the product every time the product is present in a receipt. Other products or the receipt itself are not affected by the cost center.
You can assign a cost center to a product by navigating to Sell > Products and opening the corresponding product. Then open the Details tab, the Financial accounting sub-tab, and enter the cost center at the bottom left.
Assigning a cost center to an entire receipt by opening the corresponding receipt and scrolling to the Settings area at the bottom right. Here you can enter the cost center for offers, sales orders, delivery notes, and invoices. The cost center is applied to all products in the receipt for which no different cost center is stored in the product.
Note
Assigning a different cost center to each product in a receipt in the Positions sub-tab of the receipt by clicking on the pencil icon. Open the Tax area on the right and enter the Cost center there.
Adding a cost center to a liability in the same way; however, the option is located in the middle of the left side. When exporting liabilities and invoices in the financial accounting export (DATEV Export Settings), Xentral exports the cost centers in an additional column.
As soon as you carry out a booking in the Payment reconciliation (Xentral incoming payments), you can assign a cost center to the booking. Opening the booking via the pencil icon 
and entering the Cost center on the right side.
You can also assign a cost center to each manual booking in the Account sheet tab of the Incoming payments module.
Tip
In your PayPal business account, you can store a default cost center that you can use to post your PayPal fees to a separate cost center. You can find further information on this in the article Paypal (Business account).