foreign [Music] hi there my name is Lawrence Tyndall here at glidefest Consulting and in today's servicenow tutorial I'm going to take you through the cost centers module in service now by the end of this tutorial you'll understand what a cost center is how to create a cost center and how assets expense lines and cost centers relate to each other before we go into the system I want to explain what a cost center is a cost center is a business unit within an organization that is set up for the purpose of allocating costs against it organizations use cost centers for accounting as it allows them to track every expense that occurs for each department by tracking costs at the department level organizations are able to easily manage and plan budgets without tracking costs at the cost center level organizations wouldn't be able to understand how much each department is spending determine which departments went over budget for any given Financial year and understand which costs and assets were procured under now that we've covered what a cost center is let's go into the system and explore the cost center module and create one in today's example we'll create a cost center for the marketing department the first thing you'll want to do is open up servicenow go into the application navigator and type in cost centers now click on the cost centers module under the organization application you'll now see a list displaying all out of the box cost center records click on the new button a blank cost and a form will now load in the first field we have name this is the name which will be used for the cost center I'm going to enter marketing in the next field account number here you can specify the internal account number that will be used to uniquely identify the cost center depending on the size of your organization your Finance and Accounting team may already have an account number for the cost center you're creating typically most Enterprise organizations have Erp systems like sap or netsuite where cost center numbers already exist for this example I'm just going to enter 101 855742 in the next field code this field allows you to specify a unique code for this cost center this is similar to the account number field but gives you extra flexibility when defining a cost center for this example I'm going to enter Mark zero zero zero one next we have the location field this field allows you to specify the location of the cost center if one exists this field is great if you wish to have multiple cost centers for a single Department that are located over multiple Geographic locations in this example I'm going to enter San Diego South in the next field manager this field allows you to Define who the individual is who manages this cost center this person is usually responsible for also managing the budget of the cost center I'm going to enter a bell tutor next we have the valid from and valid two Fields these fields allow you to define the dates in which the cost center is valid to and from this is great for tracking when a cost center was first set up and then closed for demo purposes I'm going to enter January 1st 2023 and December 31st 2023 now click on the submit button to create this cost center as you can now see in the list view the new cost center is now available to use let's go over to the hardware Asset Management module create an asset and charge the expense of the marketing cost center click on the new button now that the hardware asset form is loaded let's create a record for an Apple iMac 27-inch computer in the financial tab you'll see that there is a field called cost center in this field I'm going to type in marketing now save this record you'll now notice there is a related list being displayed called expense lines within this related list you can see the expense record that has been generated for this iMac computer an expense line is basically an expense allocation record that is automatically generated while creating an asset the expense line includes the cost of the asset and the source which in this case is the iMac computer please note you can manually update an expense line record in case you need to make a correction to the cost now let's head back over to the cost center module and let's take a look at the marketing cost center now you can see the expense line that was generated against this cost center for the iMac that we just created from the cost center record you can also view expense lines made against software assets and contracts this type of visibility is crucial as it allows department managers to understand what expenses are being charged to their Department this in turn creates more financial accountability and enables department managers to easily forecast Future IT expenses and that is all for this tutorial on cost centers in service now