Cost Centers – Distribute Staff Costs by Department

Cost centers split costs by department or business area. In a restaurant you often want to know what Kitchen costs versus Bar versus Floor — both for budgeting and to see where the margins are.

What a cost center is

A cost center is a label attached to costs and revenue so you can sum per department. Vendion uses them in four places:

• Labour cost in payroll data and the SIE export
• Sales per till
• Scheduled shifts and shift templates, as a grouping in the schedule view
• Bookkeeping voucher rows

Typical cost centers in a restaurant are Kitchen, Bar, Floor, Dishwashing and Administration.

Creating cost centers

1. Go to Personal ▸ Inställningar ▸ Organisation (Staff ▸ Settings ▸ Organisation)
2. Under Kostnadsställen, fill in:
   • Namn (name) — a clear department name, for example Kök
   • Kod (code) — required, for example 100
   • Konto (account) — the labour cost account in your bookkeeping, often 7210
3. Click Lägg till

The code is not a sorting label. It is the key the SIE export groups on — set the wrong code and the cost lands on the wrong account in your books. That is why the field is required. Talk to your accountant about which codes and accounts fit your existing chart of accounts.

Who may change them. Creating, editing and deleting cost centers requires the manage-settings permission — not the payroll permission.

That means someone allowed to edit payroll may still lack the right to touch cost centers. The list is then shown but the write controls are disabled, with a line stating which permission is required.

Payroll is posted to the person's cost center

The cost center for payroll is set per employee:

1. Open the employee's staff record
2. Click Redigera (Edit) and choose Kostnadsställe in the employment details
3. Click Spara. The person's payroll cost is allocated to that cost center in payroll exports

This carries all the way into the SIE file: the voucher gets account numbers per item and a cost center on every row, so the bookkeeping is split automatically.

There is no split of payroll per individual shift. If a chef works one evening in the bar, the labour cost still follows their regular cost center. To split payroll between two departments you adjust it in your bookkeeping afterwards.

Analytics measures per worked shift

Analytics answers a different question than payroll, and that is deliberate.

Every time entry gets its own cost center when the person clocks in, in this order:

1. The scheduled shift's cost center
2. The till the punch was made on
3. The person's default cost center

In Analytics there is a table called Resultat per resultatenhet (result per business unit) with revenue, labour cost and labour cost as a percentage per unit. There, the person lent to the bar for an evening costs the bar — unlike the payroll posting.

Two things to know:

• Analytics calls them business units, Staff calls them cost centers. They are the same thing.
• History is not recalculated. Time entries created before the feature existed carry no code of their own and are instead attributed to the person's home department. The table states which mix the figures are built on, so you can see whether you are looking at a measurement per shift or per person.

Cost center is also available as a filter in the Analytics filter bar.

The shift template field is named something else

Shift templates have a field called Grupp i schemavyn (group in the schedule view). It used to be called Cost center, which led many to believe the shift's labour cost was posted there.

It is not. The field only controls which heading the base shift sits under in the schedule's shift view. Labour cost is posted to the employee's own cost center.

Deleting or deactivating

A cost center that is in use cannot be deleted. If you try, you are told what references it — orders, tills, employees, scheduled shifts, shift templates, voucher rows or accounting settings — and prompted to deactivate it instead.

To deactivate, open Bokföring ▸ Resultatenheter and switch off Aktiv on the unit. This preserves history and removes the unit from the choices for new employees.

Tips for a good structure

1. Keep the list short — four to six cost centers is enough. More becomes hard to assign consistently
2. Match your bookkeeping accounts — check with your accountant before you start
3. Use the same structure across all restaurants if you are a chain, otherwise the figures cannot be compared
4. Start early — cost centers are set on new time entries, and history is not recalculated retroactively