Cost centres

# Cost centres

A cost centre is a department, branch or job that you want to see on its own, such as Workshop, Pune branch or the Sharma project. Open Cost centres under Reports. Choose New centre and give it a name. The first one also makes a tracking category called Cost centre to hold them.

Sharing a line

An invoice line, a bill line or a line of a manual journal can be shared between centres by percent. The shares for a line add up to exactly 100%. Pop Books refuses anything else and tells you what the shares add up to.

Open Allocate a document at the bottom of the Cost centres screen, choose a draft invoice, bill or journal, and press Share on a line. Type a percent for each centre you want. Leave the others empty.

Shares are chosen before the document is issued or the journal is posted. After that they are fixed. If a draft is edited, a line keeps its shares by its position in the document.

What happens when it is issued

When the invoice or bill is issued, or the journal is posted, the amount of each shared line is split between the centres. The cents are handed out so the parts add up to the line exactly. For example 1,000.01 shared 33.33%, 33.33% and 33.34% becomes 333.30, 333.30 and 333.41.

A line that goes 100% to one centre also gets that centre as its tracking tag, so the ordinary tracking reports show it too. Voiding the invoice or bill, or reversing the journal, gives the same split back the other way, so the centres net out.

The report

The screen lists each centre with its income, costs and profit for the dates you pick, and shows Profit and loss by cost centre below. It has a column for each centre, a column called Unallocated for lines nobody shared out, and a Total. The total is the same as the ordinary profit and loss for the dates, so the report always ties back to your books. You can download it as a PDF or an Excel file, and find it in the report list too.

Switching a centre off

Open a centre and choose Switch off when you stop using it. Nothing is deleted, and what it holds stays in the report. A switched off centre cannot be chosen for new shares.

Who can do what

• Anyone who can see the books can see the screen and the report.
• Adding or switching off a centre needs the permission to change setup.
• Sharing a document or journal needs the permission to make entries.

What has not been tried

Shares are set from the Cost centres screen. The invoice and bill editors do not show them yet. Tax that cannot be claimed back on a bill is added to the expense line but not shared, so it appears under Unallocated. A document in another currency is shared using the amounts posted in your own currency.