Cost Center
The Cost Center feature on ZenHR allows you to allocate cost centers, distribute employee contributions, and calculate costs based on cost center distribution or organization-level allocation.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
How are cost centers created?
Cost centers are divided into two components:
Separate Cost Centers: Projects or tasks to which employees are assigned and distributed.
Employee Organizational Levels: These are set from the employees’ professional data and don't need to be separated; they include employees’ departments, work locations, etc.
Creating Cost Centers
Left Side Menu → Cost Center → Cost Center Allocations → Cost Center Setup
The “Cost Center Setup” button on the Cost Center Allocations page redirects users to the Cost Centers Setup page, where they can define cost center groups and their associated cost centers.
Upon clicking “Add Cost Center Group”, a slider will open where users can create a group by entering:
Group Name
Group Code
Once the Groups have been added, admins can add the cost centers linked to each group. They can add Cost Centers one by one or import them in bulk.
To add a new cost center to this group, the user should click "Add Cost Center”, a slider will then appear, allowing the user to enter the cost center name in both languages, choose the start and end dates if needed, and input the cost center code and entity codes.
Assigning Cost Centers
Once the cost centers have been created, admins can start assigning them to their employees accordingly.
Left Side Menu → Cost Center → Cost Center Allocations
Once the admin clicks assign, there will be two options to choose from: “Employee” allocation or “Import Allocations” to import multiple employee allocations using an Excel spreadsheet.
“Employee” Allocation: This option allows admins to add a single employee at a time.
Select the employee.
Enter the Start Date (mandatory) and End Date (optional).
Choose the cost centers and set the contribution percentage for each cost center. By clicking on “+Add Cost Center”, you can add as many cost centers as you want. The total contributions should equal to 100%.
Once you’re done, click “Add”
Import multiple allocations: This option allows admins to import multiple employee allocations through an Excel spreadsheet.
Click “Download Template” to download the allocation Excel spreadsheet.
Fill in the Excel spreadsheet by adding the employment number, the cost center, and their contribution percentages.
Upload the Excel spreadsheet.
Set the allocation dates.
Finally, click “Import”
Cost Center Reports
Left Side Menu → Cost Center → Calculated Costs & Reports.
The Calculated Costs and Reports page will allow admins to quickly overview the calculated costs of cost centers and extract reports.
Through this page, the admin can choose their default cost center (whether the project allocation or org-level. If the org level is selected, the admin must decide which org level (Department, Work-Location, Section, etc..).
There are two kinds of reports that the admin can extract: Employee Cost Center and Cost Center Report.
Employee Cost Center Report
The Employee Cost Report allows admins to generate actionable insights into cost distributions, empowering better decision-making and financial transparency.
Cost Center Report
The Cost Center Report allows the admin to view an Excel report with the total costs of each cost center or organizational level.
How do we distribute costs?
Costs will be distributed whenever the salary is calculated, and they will be redistributed if any off-cycle transactions or company expenses are added. However, admins can distribute previous salaries from the distribution page.
Left Side Menu → Cost Center → Calculated Costs and Reports→ Distribution Status
Through this page, admins can mass-distribute employees’ costs by selecting the month and year to view the salary distributions and the employees to whom they would like to distribute the costs.
The system will display employees' distribution status for that month/year. There are four possible statuses:
Distributed: The salary costs have been distributed for the employee in the selected month/year.
Not Distributed: The salary costs have not been distributed. Possible reasons include:
Salary not calculated: No salary calculation was done for this period.
Distributing: The system is currently distributing the employee's costs.
Failure: An error occurred while attempting to distribute the costs for the employee.
