Your site & cost centres
Set up and manage the cost centres orders are billed to
Your Site Settings page is where you manage the user accounts and cost centres linked to your site. This article focuses on cost centres — for managing user accounts, see the article on site users and roles.
What is a cost centre?
A cost centre lets you group orders under a department, class, or budget code, and assign the people who need to approve orders placed against it. When someone places an order, they choose a cost centre and one of its approvers.
Each cost centre has:
- A name (for example, "Innovation Division")
- A short code (for example, "INN-007") that uniquely identifies it on your site
- A list of approvers — users on your site who can approve orders charged to it
- An active/inactive status
Adding a cost centre
- On the Site Settings page, go to the Cost Centres section.
- Select Add Cost Centre.
- Enter a Name and a Code. The code is automatically converted to uppercase.
- Use the Active switch if you want the cost centre to be available immediately (this is on by default).
- Under Assign Approvers, search for people by name or email and select who should be able to approve orders for this cost centre.
- Select Add Cost Centre to save.
A code must be unique for your site — if you enter one that's already in use, you'll be asked to choose a different one.
Editing a cost centre
- On the cost centre's card, select the menu icon and choose Edit.
- Update the name, code, active status, or approvers.
- Select Save Changes.
Deactivating or reactivating a cost centre
- On the cost centre's card, select the menu icon and choose Deactivate (or Reactivate for an inactive cost centre).
- Confirm the action.
Deactivating a cost centre prevents new orders from being placed against it. Reactivating it makes it available for new orders again. A cost centre with orders still in progress can't be deactivated until those orders are completed or cancelled.
Importing cost centres from a CSV file
If you need to add several cost centres at once, you can upload a CSV file instead of creating them one by one.
- In the Cost Centres section, select Import from CSV.
- Select Download CSV Template if you need a starting file. The required columns are name and code.
- Drag and drop your CSV file into the dialog, or select Choose File to browse for it.
- Once the file is checked, you'll see how many rows are ready to import and how many have problems. Any invalid rows are listed with the row number, the field, and what's wrong with it.
- Select Confirm Import to create the valid rows. You can also select Choose Different File to start over.
If some rows fail during the import, the ones that succeeded are still created — you'll see a summary of how many were created and how many failed, along with the reasons for any failures.
A single import file can contain up to 500 cost centres and must be no larger than 2MB.