Cost allocation, or allocation, is a process used to distribute the costs of a shared resource or expense among different departments, product lines or activities within an organization. Allocation is a fundamental accounting and financial management concept.
Although allocation is a common process and concept, it’s important to understand how some basic terms are defined within Beeline Enterprise.
Terminology
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Amount cost allocation option | The monetary value of expenditures for a product, service, time, activity, or combination to which cost is estimated. |
| Cost allocation | The process of identifying, aggregating, and assigning costs to one or more cost objects. |
| Cost allocation reference | A cost allocation string without a header-level ID. The Cost allocation reference lets a user select from different cost allocation templates. A cost allocation reference may be included as part of a cost allocation string. |
| Cost object | An item your organization wants to separately estimate and track cost, such as company code, facility, a GL string, a project, and more. What those objects are varies by your business needs and your internal systems, such as your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. |
| Percentage cost allocation option | The share allocated to a product, service, time, activity, or combination for which cost is estimated. |
| Segment | An individual attribute of your template that relates to a cost object. For example, if one of your cost objects is company code, the segment can be labeled segment 1, segment 2, and so on. Segments can match these components in your account system, like work breakdown structure (WBS), cost center, general ledger (GL) code, and much more. |
| Segment values | The available cost object values that can be selected when viewing a template. |
| String | Comprises a set of cost object segments. For example, the cost allocation code, the unit type, the distribution type, and more. |
| Template | The structure or combination of fields used for cost allocation. Templates define how cost objects are combined. |
| Unit cost allocation option | The portion of a product, service, time, activity, or combination to which cost is estimated. |
Ready to explore?
- Overview
- Understanding the components
- Including fields in your Advanced Notification Templates
- Managing cost data with imports
- Your users’ experience
- Reporting
Documentation release: Beeline Enterprise | Q4 2024