Cost Center Report
The Cost Center Report rolls up your postings by cost center so you can see, at a glance, what each branch, department, project, or any other dimension you track is contributing and consuming. Parents include the totals of their children, and every cost center expands into the underlying GL accounts that produced the numbers.
This is the report you reach for when the Chart of Accounts gives you the right totals but not in the shape you need to manage the business.
Where to find it
Go to Analytics > Cost Centers > Cost center report.
How it works
The report works on three filters:
- From date and To date define the period you want to see. The default is your fiscal year start through today.
- Data source controls which postings are aggregated:
- GL postings is the canonical view. It includes every journal entry line that carries a cost center, whether it came from an invoice, an expense, a manual journal entry, or any other posting source.
- Transactional is a narrower view that aggregates invoice lines (as credit, treated as Sales Revenue) and expense lines (as debit, grouped by their GL account). It skips manual Journal Entries and the AP/AR side of postings.
- Include inactive brings Cost Centers flagged inactive back into the report. Off by default, they stay hidden so the tree shows only the dimensions you actively use.
Click View to refresh after changing filters.
Reading the tree
Each parent cost center expands into its children, and each child expands into the GL accounts where its postings landed. The figures roll up: the total on Operations is the sum of Warehouse plus Logistics plus any postings booked directly to Operations itself.
Branches that have no activity in the selected range are pruned, so the tree only shows what you are actually using.
| Column |
What it shows |
| Code |
The cost center or account code. Cost center rows are bold, account rows sit underneath. |
| Name |
The human label for the cost center or account. |
| Type |
A badge that distinguishes a Cost Center row from an Account row. |
| Debit |
Total debits posted to this row in the selected range. |
| Credit |
Total credits posted to this row in the selected range. |
| Net |
Debit minus Credit. Negative numbers appear in red, useful for quickly spotting net-credit lines (typically revenue Cost Centers). |
The KPI strip at the top shows the count of active Cost Centers in the result, the grand total debit, the grand total credit, and the grand net.
Exporting and sharing
- The Excel toolbar button (or the Excel header action) downloads the tree as a flat spreadsheet with parent-child indentation preserved.
- Use Expand all and Collapse all in the toolbar to quickly switch between summary and detail views before exporting.
Tips
- Start in GL postings mode. It is the source of truth, since every transaction that affects the books eventually lands in the GL.
- Drop to Transactional when you specifically want to compare invoice revenue to expense spend without GL-only entries (such as month-end accruals) distorting the picture.
- Run the report at month-end and again at year-end with the same dates as your P&L. The grand totals should reconcile to the P&L for the cost-centered portion of revenue and expense accounts.
- If a cost center you expect to see is missing, check three things: it has activity in the selected range, it is marked active (or Include inactive is on), and the postings that should belong to it actually carry the right Cost Center on their lines.
Related: Cost Centers - Financial Reports - Chart of Accounts - Expenses - Invoices - Journal Entries