Cost Center

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Introduction
• Fields

Introduction

A Cost Center is where the Billing Costs of your Assets are allocated to. Assign a Cost Center to a Company or a Location to automatically bill every Asset underneath it.

Fields

• Name
  • The Name of this Cost Center.

• Code
  • A short Code for this Cost Center, for example used on your Invoices.

• Description
  • An optional free text Description.

• Company / Location
  • Link this Cost Center to one Company and/or one Location.

• Asset Manager (User and/or Group)
  • Who is responsible for this Cost Center.

See our Roles & Permissions Article to learn how the Asset Manager affects Asset Editor Scope

How an Asset Finds Its Cost Center

A Cost Center is not picked by the Asset itself. Which Cost Center an Asset is charged to is decided by the Billing Rule that applies to it – every Rule carries a target that tells au2mator where to look.

Seven targets are available:

• Assigned User’s Cost Center
  • The Cost Center of the User the Asset is assigned to.

• Owner’s Cost Center
  • The Cost Center of the User who owns the Asset.

• Asset’s Cost Center
  • A Cost Center set directly on the Hardware Asset.

• Location’s Cost Center
  • The Cost Center linked to the Asset’s Location.

• Company’s Cost Center
  • The Cost Center linked to the Asset’s Company.

• Location
  • The Location itself, without going through a Cost Center.

• Company
  • The Company itself, without going through a Cost Center.

If the target cannot be resolved, the Asset is skipped – it is never charged to a fallback. A notebook assigned to a User who has no Cost Center is skipped by a Rule that targets the assigned User’s Cost Center. The reason is written to the Billing Run Log and kept for seven years.

An unexpectedly high skip rate is almost always a target that does not resolve, not a failure. The Billing Run Log names the reason for every skipped Asset.

Where a Cost Center Is Used

The same Cost Center record can be referenced from five places:

• on a User
• on a Hardware Asset
• on a Company
• on a Location
• as its Asset Manager, which also decides who sees it in My Billing

Related Articles

• Billing Rule – where the target is chosen.
• Billing Run – where skipped Assets are listed.
• My Billing – what a Cost Center manager sees.
• Roles & Permissions – how the Asset Manager affects scope.