Overview
Cost pool or cost center is a set of costs that are incurred on a specific group of activities, expenses or any business center. It can be a group of accounts presenting the aggregate cost (both direct and indirect) of performing a service or producing a product. It represents different categories of expenses for a company. The benefit of using a cost pool is to classify expenditure of your company or track your budget for a project. For example, you can have an activity cost pool that can help you in calculating the cost of providing a specific service to your client or administration to track your overheads. This feature is mostly used by companies who are DCAA compliant or deal with federal (government) contracts. Click here to watch a video on managing cost pools in BQE CORE.
In case of job costing, companies assign costs such as labor or materials directly to projects on an ongoing basis. The company also allocates overheads, such as utilities, insurance, rent, etc. to projects based on a predefined, estimated overhead rate. This allows you to make estimates or budgets for the projects. Mostly companies use cost pools to calculate how much to bill clients on Cost Plus projects, however, it can be used for other projects too.
In BQE CORE, you can create a cost pool and then assign it to income and expense account in Chart of Accounts. These cost pools are associated with your accounts and can be used to track any activity or transaction affecting those accounts. They can also be used for budgeting purposes. Whenever needed, you can run reports to see the application of those cost pools and the distribution of costs. The most common cost pools are fringe, overheads and General and Administrative (G&A). The order of these cost pool items in the list matters.
How To
Create Cost Pools
To create a new cost pool, watch this video or follow these steps:
- Open the Cost Pools screen from the side menu > Settings > Accounting.
- Click Add and enter the required information in the top row of the grid:
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Name
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Click Done. After saving, you can move the line items in any specific order you want by dragging
up and down.
After setting up these cost pools, you can assign them to the G/L accounts from the Chart of Account screen.
View Reports
To view a report, watch this video or follow these steps:
- Open the Cost Pools screen from the side menu > Settings > Accounting.
- In the list view, click More > View Reports.
- Select a report from the Report List dialog. It opens in the viewer.
- Preview the report and then choose to export or print it.
You can also check the detailed video on running and managing reports in CORE.
Export Cost Pools
In CORE, you can export cost pools to the Comma Separated Values file format. CORE exports data from all available columns and not just the columns visible in the grid.
To export the cost pools to a .CSV file, watch this video or follow these steps:
- Open the Cost Pools screen from the side menu > Settings > Accounting.
- In the list view, click More > Export as CSV.
- A .csv export file is created and saved on your system at the default download location, say your desktop. Click to open the spreadsheet.
You can also check the detailed video on exporting data in CORE.
Mark Screen as Favorite
You can mark or flag the most-often used and important screens in CORE as your favorites up to a maximum of ten. These favorite screens then display separately on the side menu under the Favorites list. You can manage all your favorite screens in CORE from User Settings.
To mark this screen as your favorite, watch this video or follow these steps:
- Open the Cost Pools screen from the side menu > Settings > Accounting.
- Click
on the top-right.
- You can access this screen from the side menu under Favorites.
You can also check the detailed video on marking screens as favorite in CORE.