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Managing Cost Centres

This article describes the steps required to manage cost centres in Buttonwood Central, including managing budgets and viewing charges.

Cost centres provide a way for cloud costs to be tracked against budgets.

Charges are assigned to cost centres by:

  • Configuring Central to ingest billing data directly from service providers;
  • Users deploying workloads using Buttonwood Automate; or
  • In the case of SaaS charges, via subscription properties of each configured application.

Prerequisites

  • Administrative access to Buttonwood Central
    or
  • User access to Buttonwood Central with a cost centre delegation

Viewing Cost Centres

This section describes the steps required to view cost centres which have been created in Buttonwood Central.

Procedure Steps

  1. Login to Buttonwood Central
  2. Navigate to Govern > Cost Centres
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  3. Click View or the name of the cost centremceclip0.png
  4. The article My Cost Centres provides detailed steps required to utilise cost centre functions

Adding Cost Centres

This section describes the steps required to add cost centres to Buttonwood Central.

Cost centres can be added manually, or in batches via a csv file import.

Manually Adding Cost Centres

  1. Login to Buttonwood Central
  2. Navigate to Govern > Cost Centres
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  3. Click Add
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  4. In the Add Cost Centre screen, enter the following information:
    • Name: A unique name for this cost centre
    • Code: A code for the cost centre, which usually aligns to cost centres from the organisation's finance platform
    • Description: A description for the cost centre
    • Allow Unmanaged Resource Charges: Allows costs to be automatically allocated to the cost centre based on defined rules
    • Owner: A nominated cost centre delegate - the owner is responsible for managing the cost centre and its budgets 
      Note: If a user does not appear in the drop down list to select as the owner, ensure that they have been configured as a cost centre delegate
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  5. Click Create
  6. A status message indicates the status of the request

Importing Cost Centres

  1. Login to Buttonwood Central
  2. Navigate to Govern > Cost Centres
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  3. Click Import
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  4. On the Import Cost Centres from CSV file screen, provide the csv file containing cost centre details.
    Note: A sample file is provided on this screen.
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  5. Click Import
  6. The content of the file is shown on screen prior to being imported
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  7. Click Import
  8. The status of each cost centre will be displayed with related error messages - any failures can be modified and resubmitted
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  9. Click Close once all cost centres have successfully been impored
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Editing Cost Centres

This section describes the steps required to edit cost centres in Buttonwood Central.

Procedure Steps

  1. Login to Buttonwood Central
  2. Navigate to Govern > Cost Centres
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  3. From the drop down menu, select Edit
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  4. On the Update Cost Centre screen, modify the cost centre properties as required
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  5. Click Save
  6. A notification indicates the status of the request
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Closing/Opening Cost Centres

This section describes the steps required to close and open cost centres in Buttonwood Central.

When a cost centre is created, it is automatically created in an open state, allowing charges to be associated to the cost centre.

Note: Open cost centres must also have active budgets created before costs can be allocated.

Procedure Steps

  1. Login to Buttonwood Central
  2. Navigate to Govern > Cost Centres
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  3. From the drop down menu, select Close or Open
    Note: Only one of these options will appear depending on the current state of the budget
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  4. On the Warning confirmation prompt, click Close or Open
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  5. A notification indicates the status of the request
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Removing Cost Centres

This section describes the steps required to delete cost centres from Buttonwood Central.

Cost centres cannot be deleted if they have budgets or charges associated to them. Additionally, the following system generated cost centres cannot be deleted, but can be edited:

  • IaaS Cost Centre
  • SaaS Cost Centre

Procedure Steps

  1. Login to Buttonwood Central
  2. Navigate to Govern > Cost Centres
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  3. From the drop down menu, select Delete
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  4. On the Delete Cost Centre screen, click Delete
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