Cost Centers and Accounts

Allegra allows you to budget and track times and expenses for items. For this purpose, the system provides accounts and cost centers. All expenses are accumulated in accounts. Each account belongs to a cost center. Projects record their expenses in the accounts they are allowed to use.

You can create as many accounts as you like. Accounts can have different states, for example, they can be open, so that authorized people can post their expenses to them, or they can be closed, so that it is no longer possible to post expenses to them.

An account can belong to one or more projects. For example, there can be accounts for general tasks or overheads such as departmental meetings, holidays, sickness, etc.

Cost centers and accounts

Allegra is not an accounting system. However, it is easy to connect an ERP system like SAP or Oracle with the information stored in Allegra. In this case, make sure that the account and cost center numbers in Allegra match those in the accounting system.

Accounting can be activated separately for each project. So if a project manager does not need accounting and budgeting for their project, this feature can be disabled.

Cost centers can be deleted. In this case, their accounts will be transferred to a replacement cost center.

Setting up accounting

First, you need to create the cost centers. Allegra associates only a few pieces of information with the cost centers: a unique number that should match the number of the accounting software, if any, and a name. Often, cost centers correspond to departments.

The second step is to create accounts. Accounts have four properties:

• A unique account number

• A name

• A cost center

• A state

The account number should match that of the accounting system used. The account name can be any string and should briefly describe the purpose of the account. Each account is assigned to exactly one cost center. The person responsible for the cost center is also the person responsible for the account.

Each account has a status. The status determines whether the account can be actively used or whether it is closed. If the account is closed, it will no longer appear in the selection fields when users need to record their expenses.

Accounts can be deleted, but their entire history must then be assigned to another account that still exists.

Accounts can accumulate either monetary expenses (costs) or time expenses (efforts). Each project defines the base currency for monetary costs. you can have different base currencies for different projects.

The base currency for the time spent is one working hour. Working days are defined by the values in the project type definition, in the project definition, or in the user’s definition for the number of working hours.

The third step in setting up accounting for a project is to assign the previously defined accounts to the projects. It is possible to assign a single account to several projects. It is also possible to decouple accounts from projects.