Cost Center

The smallest segment of your organization for which you collect and formally report costs. You can assign supervisors and other managers and their employees to a cost center to track labor time.

You create cost centers and define their characteristics in Cost Center Maintenance.

When you create a cost center, you specify the default labor charge code for employees assigned to the cost center.

When an employee clocks in, Labor Tracking uses the employee's default labor charge code to track time until the employee changes the Labor Charge Code (LCC) or starts working in the Production Operator Dashboard (see Production Operator Dashboard (POD)).

You can assign a different default labor charge code to a specific user in User Maintenance. When this user clocks in, Labor Tracking uses the default LCC in User Maintenance.

Structure

Cost center can have the following attributes:

Status
Default LCC (see Labor Charge Code)
Parent/Rollup CC (see Rollup Examples)
Custom Data (see Custom Data)

For more information, see Cost Center Maintenance.

You can create cost center hierarchies in the system, which mirror the structure of your organization. For example, you have the following cost centers:

Maintenance
Manufacturing
Quality

Your company divides the Manufacturing cost center in the following way:

Cell 1 Mfg
Cell 2 Mfg

The figure below depicts the relationship:

This graphic is explained in the accompanying text.

Manufacturing is the parent cost center of Cell 1 Mfg and Cell 2 Mfg. Parent cost centers are also called rollup centers because data from the cost centers under the parent must be included in the parent cost center's totals (see Configuring Cost Centers).

Once you have defined cost centers, you can assign users and supervisors to a cost center (see Configuring Cost Centers).

Example

Creating Temporary Supervisors

You want to assign a user as a temporary supervisor over a cost center.

Jill is the permanent supervisor of Cell 1 Mfg. While she is on vacation from August 17-23, 2009, her assistant, Jack will act as supervisor. On the Supervisor tab page for Jack’s record in User Maintenance, you enter 8-17-2009 in the Valid From column and 8-23-2009 in the Valid To column.