Profit centre

A Profit centre is an attribute or category of general ledger account used only in reporting, usually to allow you to create a Profit and Loss report for different branches, divisions or departments.

Go to General ledger > Setup > Profit centres.

Here’s where the Profit centre is assigned on a general ledger account:

An account’s profit centre has no effect on the transactions performed, the general Ledger category or any other aspect of the account. It is purely a mechanism to allow the filtering of data on your reports. Every account must be assigned to exactly one Profit centre (even if that profit centre is called “Default”, for example). There is no practical limit to the number of profit centres that can be created and assigned to other accounts.

Where are profit centres referenced in Accentis

  • The Accounts form, as an attribute of a G/L account
  • , as filters on the report and a displayed attribute against an account

Profit centres and account coding

For example, if you had an income account of 41100 and decide you would like to have two branches, each with their own profit centre, you would require two income accounts – one for each branch. If your profit centres were called “NSW” and “QLD”, you could call your two income accounts “41100.NSW” and “41100.QLD” and then assign the correct profit centre in the Account form for each.

The profit centre does not define the account code, and the account code does not define an account’s profit centre. You are free to have any account code format that you like. This means you can have profit centres called “QLD” and “NSW” in your drop-down selection on the Account form, but you could call your income accounts 41100-1 and 41100-2. Whatever coding scheme you use, make sure it makes sense, is logical and deterministic (that is, people can determine the profit centre easily from the code). The format of your account codes could therefore be:

41100.01, 41101-Q, 41101QLD

Keep in mind how your account codes will look when printed out or listed in your Chart of Accounts.

Last edit 06/09/19

Special actions available for users with Administrator permissions:

  • None

Database rules:

  • None
  • No practical limit to the number of profit centres that can be defined
  • Profit centre codes are FlexiCode
  • Profit centres do not affect the naming scheme of your Account codes

Module: General ledger

Category: Profit centres

Activation: Main > General ledger > Setup > Profit centres

Form style: Multiple instance, SODA

Reference: List, Read-only

This list displays the codes of all Profit centres that have been defined in your Accentis Enterprise system. As you click on each entry in the Profit centres list, the details for that Profit centre are shown in the area to the right.

The list of Profit centres is non-editable and serves only as a display and selection method. When you are ready to edit or delete a Profit centre, ensure that you have the desired Profit centre selected in the list before clicking on the edit or delete button.

Reference: Text(10), Mandatory, FlexiCode

This is a short code that is used to identify the Profit centre throughout Accentis Enterprise. There are no restrictions on the types of codes you choose for your Profit centres, although it is recommended that codes which can be easily identified by all users are used for clarity.

Reference: Text(64)

The Profit centre name represents a longer form name of the Profit centre, allowing you add a little more descriptive text than the Profit centre code field.

Reference: Memo, Expandable

The Profit centre notes field allows any notes or details related to the Profit centre to be stored. There are no restrictions on the data that you choose to enter in this field.

Yes. Once an account has been assigned to a profit centre, you can change to a different profit centre. However, the profit centre is attached to the G/L Accounts, not the transactions (so if you do this, it will look like historical transactions were also recorded against the new profit centre). Keep in mind also that changing the account’s profit centre will not automatically change its Account code. You will need to change that as well.

It’s easy to create a new profit centre. Just go to General Ledger > Setup > Profit centres and click New. Keep in mind this just defines a new profit centre. It doesn't create a new set of accounts linked to that profit centre. If your goal is to duplicate a section of your P & L because, say, you have opened a new branch, you also need to create or import a new set of Profit and loss accounts for that profit centre. The easiest way to do this is with a G/L account Import.

Yes. It's not that common, because people typically tend to assign a profit centre to Profit and loss accounts. But there is no reason you could not segment your balance sheet accounts by assigning a profit centre to them. You could effectively run two independent Chart of Accounts by doing this. If you require this, please speak with our support team who can advise whether or not it's more efficient to have a separate database instead of different profit centres.

Yes. As long as the profit centre is no longer referenced by an Accounts, it can be deleted.

Yes. If you try out profit centres and they’re not for you, you can assign all of your accounts back to a single profit centre. However, if you've already split your accounts up and duplicated them so that you have two sets of accounts (one for each profit centre) and you want to bring them all back to one set of accounts, that will be much trickier. In this case, you should identify the set of accounts you want to keep and rename them appropriately, then journal the balances of the other accounts into the ones you will be retaining. This is a good point to consult your Accentis Enterprise support experts who can advise how best to complete this and the best timing for it to happen (e.g. end of financial year).

No. If you can’t see a good reason to use them, then don’t. You could simulate profit centres simply by naming all of your accounts sensibly and saying to a P & L report “show me all accounts that end in “.01” (of course, in this example, we can give you evidence of where profit centre assignment has a distinct advantage over just account coding alone).

Last edit 26/02/24

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