Configuring a Cost Center

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to Create a Cost Center in SAP Fieldglass..

Cost Center

Cost Centers can be considered logical divisions within an organization but, unlike business units, are used strictly for the purposes of allocating and tracking financial transactions.

image showing the relationship of Business Units, Cost Centers, and Sites to the WorkingNet tenant, illustrating how functional departments such as Finance, IT, Marketing, Sales, HR, Engineering, and the PMO can represent cost centers (as well as business units)

An organization’s cost centers represent the functional units to which transactions will be billed, though they don’t necessarily have to correlate precisely with business units.

Cost centers must be selected in certain transactions, such as job postings, in order to ensure that the costs of the transaction are allocated to the associated department or team.

screenshot of the Cost Center field dropdown menu on a job posting showing the functional areas that can be selected

Navigating the Cost Center Admin Object

screenshot of the Company Structure section of the Admin Menu, the Cost Center link is highlighted
1To view the list of cost centers associated to the tenant, select Cost Center from the Company Structure section of the admin menu.

Cost Center List page

A Cost Center List may show multiple versions of a cost center. In fact, they are actually the same cost center, but the list reflects the different currencies that the cost center supports. So selecting any one of those duplicated cost center codes would open the same record.

screenshot of Cost Center List page, the Workers column, the Currency column, and one of the six AC101 links in the Code column are highlighted
2The items listed in the Workers column are linked to allow you to quickly review the workers that are associated to a particular currency. Selecting a link will open the detail page of that cost center and automatically present the list of associated workers.
3If a cost center supports multiple currencies, a separate cost center record is displayed to allow for the thumbnail view of workers associated to each currency. The differences in the listed records are reflected in the Currency column.
4To view the details of a cost center, select an appropriate link in the Code column.

Cost Center Details page

A Cost Center Details page displays its standard settings, which can be edited by selecting the Edit button. It can also be inactivated from this page and, depending upon which other data objects it is associated with, completely removed.

screenshot of AC101 Details Page with the associations tree and the Currency section highlighted
5

There are many items in the SAP Fieldglass application that can be associated to, and consequently driven by, cost centers:

  • Budgets
  • Expense codes
  • Task codes
  • Users
  • Workers
  • Legal Entity
6Changes to the Currency list would be reflected in the number of Cost Center records listed on the Cost Center List page. Each currency listed here would create a separate record in the list, though each would lead back to this details page.

Create a Cost Center

WorkingNet has formed a new product unit, called NetAlysis, to develop network diagnostic software for its networking equipment.

As the SAP Fieldglass administrator for WorkingNet, you will need to create a company profile in the application to accommodate NetAlysis.

You’ve already created a business unit for NetAlysis, so now you’ll create a cost center.

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