Cost Centers are an Oracle ATG Web Commerce feature that allows specific site customers to track their internal costs by designating certain parts of their organization as cost centers. Commerce tracks which items and orders belong to each cost center.
For example, an insurance company could set up accounts with an office supply site so individual employees of the insurance company could log on and purchase supplies. The insurance company could set up several cost centers for each department that will be ordering supplies through the web site. When an insurance company employee logs in to purchase supplies, they would specify the department to which they belong. The insurance company could then track costs by department and run related reports.
There are two major parts to the cost center feature, assigning cost centers to profiles and assigning costs to cost centers within an order. The concept of assigning cost centers to profiles allows a site to define what cost centers a given user is allowed to assign costs. A user is assigned a list of cost centers. Adding costs to cost centers allows a user to create CostCenter objects within their order using the data from their profile. Then they can assign item, shipping, or tax costs to the cost centers.
This chapter includes the following sections:
