As costs are incurred, the system tracks them and accumulates them at different levels or cost centers within your organization. Cost centers are part of the accounting hierarchy.

Cost center records display financial statistics, such as budget amounts, year to date actual amounts, and committed amounts for the cost center. These amounts represent the fiscal year rather than the calendar year. The cost center record also contains free form account segment fields for building the general ledger (GL) account number. General ledger account numbers are a concatenation of the elements, such as company, business unit, cost center, project, and so on. There are some elements that are not available or configured within the Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management application but are still able to make up the GL string when financial transactions (FTs) are created. A Cost Center Monthly Statistics zone also allows you to display more detailed information by month in a graph.

User records that result in costs or charges need to reference a cost center that has this value set to Yes. For example, when users create activities, the referenced cost centers must “allow user charges”. This value is set to No on cost centers that are specifically designated for general ledger or system generated costs. For example, an inventory cost center is referenced on storerooms to balance the debit and credit sides of the general ledger (issue materials for an activity to charge the debit side and reduce the inventory value to adjust the debit side).