Costing Setup and Structure

Exo Time and Attendance allows for a very simple or very complex cost centre structure depending on what you require. Numeric codes are used. You can select the levels and possible number of cost centres by the number of digits you use to make up that code number.

A typical costing setup would start with a cost centre code of 12. The first digit would represent a Centre, say 1 = Auckland, 2 = Hamilton and so on up to nine centres. The second digit could be used to represent a Work Area like 1 = Office, 2 = Sales, 3 = Dispatch and so on up to nine work areas. A Cost Centre code number like 11 would represent Auckland/Office, 21 would represent Hamilton/Office. 13 = Auckland/Dispatch 23 = Hamilton/Dispatch

The first step is to set up the structure that your company will be using:

On the Utilities menu choose Setup Exo Time and Attendance, Cost Centre Structure Setup.
In the section 'Cost Centre Structure' in Analysis Code 1 enter a Name of Centre and length of 1 (digit).
In Analysis Code 2 enter a Name of Work Area and a length of 1.

Second you need to specify the possible valid cost centres for your business, and their names:

On the Maintenance menu choose Cost Centres.
Add codes and descriptions. Note that the codes are 2 digits, meaning that they have combined the two structures you created in Exo Time and Attendance setup.

Thirdly, you need to assign the cost centre to the appropriate employees. Note that you can assign a cost centre to a dollar amount in several ways:

To the employee's default cost centre - thus rendering all pay for that employee to go to the one cost centre
To an individual wage transaction - useful for job costing or employees who work in various areas of the business
To a shared cost centre for holiday, or sick pay
To an allowance

One employee can have several cost centres. You can assign expected proportions of costing for salaried or waged employees by choosing Costing in the standard pay screen. Exo Time and Attendance can handle in excess of 10,000 cost centres.

You can capture this information in the costing analysis report. Similarly you can sort most reports by the employee's default cost centre. If necessary you can link a corresponding general ledger account to any given cost centre, for accounting purposes.

The important issue for each user to decide is, what do you want to analyse in relation to wages and salary paid out?

A Restaurant owner may only want to know what wages/salary costs in each restaurant. He would use a single level code, maybe only one digit. If he wanted to know what wages cost in the Kitchen, Waiting, and Administration areas for each restaurant then he would need to include another level in his structure. Maybe one digit for each level, a total of two digits would be sufficient.

Up to 12 digits can be used in the cost centre field to identify centres. These digits can be divided into (up to) Four Levels

Example you may wish to have a cost centre like the following :

Auckland / Workshop / Steel Vats / Job No . To achieve this you select the number of digits to always represent each level.

For the four level structure, Auckland / Workshop / Steel Vats / Job No, the user would need to decide on the number of digits likely to be used for each level.

One digit allows up to 9 Cost Centres. Two digits allow up to 99. Three digits up to 999

Level Description Digits used

Code 1 Area_______________ ? (the first digit/s left to right)

Code 2 Department__________ ? (the next digit/s) to right

Code 3 Job Type____________ ? (the next digit/s) to right

Code 4 Job Number__________ ? (the next digit/s) to right

Total digits used must not exceed 12 All digits and all levels do not need to be used

NOTE: Creating Departments and Cost Centres are two separate issues in Exo Time and Attendance; Departments are used as a means of grouping employees and being able to report on those groupings and obviously total hours for a department will be reported on those reports.