Cost Centers are individual business units, such as subsidiaries, divisions, or branches, that use Samsara products and are responsible for paying their license costs. Cost Centers help you organize your entities, such as devices, users, or drivers, and their associated licenses in the Itemized Cost Breakdown so you can better allocate costs to your business units. To use Cost Centers, you must enable Itemized Cost Breakdown and have the relevant permissions to access Itemized Cost Breakdown.
You can create and assign Cost Centers to entities, such as devices, users, and drivers, to receive accurate total and per-product costs incurred by each Cost Center. After you upload Cost Center information to the dashboard it will be included in the Itemized Cost Breakdown for all future invoices. The Itemized Cost Breakdown also includes a summary for each Cost Center of total costs per license type to help you view total license costs per business unit.
To create or modify a Cost Center, perform the following workflow:
-
Enable Itemized Cost Breakdown.
Or, if already enabled, go to Itemized Cost Breakdown (Settings (
) > Organization > Billing > Itemized Cost Breakdown > Manage).
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Select Cost Centers.
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Click + Upload CSV in the upper right-hand corner.
-
Download Cost Centers List.
The downloaded template includes a read-only list that contains all of your entities, such as devices, users, and drivers, and their associated tags, along with an editable Cost Center column.
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If you need to create a Cost Center, enter a Cost Center name for each entity you would like to assign to the Cost Center.
Cost Center assignments are not required for each entity. Any entity that is not associated with a Cost Center through your CSV upload is designated to an Unallocated Cost Center in the Itemized Cost Breakdown.
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Update, add, or delete any Cost Centers you would like to modify for the associated entities.
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Save.
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Export the list to CSV.
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Return to the + Upload CSV prompt, and Upload your CSV file.
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Preview Changes.
After you Preview Changes, you are automatically moved to the Cost Centers CSV Uploads tab to track the process of your CSV upload.
When the CSV upload is complete you can see what items were modified. To finalize the changes:
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Select Review to view the changes and ensure the Cost Center names are accurate.
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(Optional) If you need to make adjustments, Discard Upload and make any changes in your CSV, and then repeat steps 6 through 9 of Create, Edit, or Delete Cost Centers.
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Finalize Changes.
-
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View the Cost Centers tab to view your modified Cost Centers.
Any changes you made to Cost Centers will be included in the Itemized Cost Breakdown when your next invoice is generated.
The Itemized Cost Breakdown provides a cost allocation based on the configuration of your Cost Centers at the time your invoice is generated. If your Cost Center allocations are modified after the Itemized Cost Breakdown is generated, Samsara does not recalculate the Itemized Cost Breakdown.
You can view your current Cost Centers in the Cost Centers tab ( (Settings ( ) > Organization > Billing > Itemized Cost Breakdown > Manage > Cost Centers).
The Cost Centers tab includes a table that enables you to view which Cost Centers are associated with which entities. You can filter the table by Cost Center and Entity Type.
In the Cost Center table you can view the following details:
|
Field |
Description |
|---|---|
|
Cost Center |
The name of the individual business unit, such as a subsidiary, division, or branch, that uses Samsara products and is responsible for paying their license costs. |
|
Entity Type |
Indicates if the entity is a device, driver, user, or organization. |
|
Entity ID |
Unique identifier of the entity type, such as a driver ID, vehicle ID, or user ID. This number is pulled from the various reports in which these entities exist in the dashboard. |
|
Entity Name |
The name of the device, driver, user, or organization. |
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