Cost centers are one way to control your costs in internal accounting. A cost center is an area of your company where costs are incurred or a service is provided that is represented by a unique number. As cost centers are only used for internal accounting, they can be structured in any way you like.
Typical ways to structure your cost centers are:
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Function: Your cost centers can be based on the departments of your company, like Sales, Warehouse, and Management.
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Location: Different branches or buildings can be implemented as cost centers.
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Project: Large projects can get their own cost centers, so you can easily tell how much money has been put into the project.
In Xentral cost centers can be assigned to products, documents (including liabilities), and payments.
Cost centers are included in an extra column in the financial accounting export when exporting invoices or liabilities and can also be displayed on documents by using the variable {KOSTENSTELLE} in the respective text template.
Note
To evaluate your cost centers you can use one of the standard reports in the Reports module called 074 - Evaluation of the cost center.
Even though you can structure your cost centers freely, we recommend that you set up a logical structure for the entirety of your cost centers (also called cost center plan) along the following points:
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Hierarchical: The first digits of your cost center should be more general and get more specific as you go along. You can, e.g., assign the first digits to your branches, the following digits to your departments, and so on.
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Expandable: You should usually assign two or three digits to a piece of information, so you can either expand the information if needed (e.g. a growing number of branches or departments) or further specify cost centers in the future (the HR department is divided into talent acquisition and administration).
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Practical: The more cost centers you have, the more control you have over your costs. At the same time this makes accounting more complex and increases administrative needs. In general, smaller companies should have less cost centers than larger ones.
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Keep in mind that every company is different and has distinct needs based on the industry they work in, their location, and their organizational structures. Please check the cost structure and the needs of your company before implementing cost centers.
The Cost centers app allows you to create new cost centers and gives you an overview of all costs centers in a searchable table.
To create a cost center:
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Enter Cost centers into the Smart Search and open the respective entry. The app opens.
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Click + NEW.
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Enter the Number of your cost center. Ideally you have already created a cost center plan and can enter the number here.
Note
To export your cost centers to DATEV only certain characters are allowed in the Number field. You can use both numbers and letters, but special characters like * or & and umlauts like ä or ü are not allowed.
You can use cost centers with only numbers, only letters or a combination of both. It doesn't matter if you use upper or lower case for letters.
To minimize errors, you should only use one way to assign a number, e.g, all your cost centers should use only numbers. You should also check with your tax advisor if the numbering of your cost centers is sensible and is compatible with other software or services you might use.
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Enter a meaningful description of the cost center into the Designation field, e.g., DACH Sales. This will help you remember what the cost center does and can be searched in the overview table. It is also displayed when assigning the cost center to a product, document, or liability.
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Optional: Enter any other useful information into the Internal comment field. You can, e.g., describe what the cost center does or what the structure of the chosen cost center number is.
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Click Save.
The message: The data has been saved appears. Click the Back arrow to get back to the cost center overview.
You can change your cost centers and your cost center plan at any point by adding new cost centers, editing existing ones with the pen icon or deleting old ones with the X button
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Tip
Before deleting a cost center or making other big changes, we recommend to create a backup copy of the table via the CSV, Excel, or PDF buttons above the cost center table.
Cost centers can be added to documents by either assigning cost centers to your products or adding them directly to your documents.
When assigning a cost center to a product, the cost center will then be applied to the product whenever it is present in a document. Other items in the document or the document itself are not influenced by this.
You can assign a cost center to a product by navigating to Sell > Products and opening the respective product. Open the Details tab > Financial accounting subtab and enter the cost center on the bottom left.
You can assign a cost center to a complete document by opening the respective document and scrolling down to the Setting area on the bottom right. Here you can enter the cost center for offers, sales orders, delivery notes, and invoices. This cost center will be applied to every item in the document where no cost center is assigned in the product.
Note
You can manually assign a deviating cost center to every item in the Positions subtab of the document by clicking the pen icon . Open the Tax section on the right side and enter the Cost center there.
You can assign a cost center to a liability in the same way, except the cost center option is in the middle of the left side. When exporting liabilities or invoices via the financial accounting export, the cost centers are exported in an extra column.
Whenever a booking is made to you in the Receipt of payment module, you can attribute a cost center to the booking by opening it with the pen icon and entering the Cost center on the right side.
You can also attribute a cost center to any manual booking you do on the bottom of the Account sheet tab in Receipt of payment.
In your PayPal business account you can set up a default cost center which you can use to book all PayPal fees to a separate cost center.