Work with responsibility centers

Responsibility centers provide the ability to handle administrative centers. A responsibility center can be a cost center, a profit center, an investment center, or other company-defined administrative center. Examples of responsibility centers are a sales office, a purchasing department for several locations, and a plant planning office. For example, companies can set up user-specific views of sales and purchase documents related to a particular responsibility center.

Using multiple locations together with responsibility centers provides the ability to manage business operations in flexible, optimal ways.

Multiple locations allow companies to manage their inventory in multiple locations using one database. Two concepts, locations and stockkeeping units, are the cornerstones of this granule. A location is defined as a place that handles physical placement and quantities of items. The concept is broad enough to include locations such as plants or production facilities and distribution centers, warehouses, showrooms, and service vehicles. A stockkeeping unit is defined as an item at a specific location and/or as a variant. Using stockkeeping units, companies with multiple locations can add replenishment information, addresses, and some financial posting information at the location level. As a result, they can replenish variants of the same item for each location and order items based on location-specific replenishment information.

To set up a responsibility center

1. Choose the icon, enter Responsibility Centers, and then choose the related link.

2. Choose the New action.

3. Fill in the fields as necessary. Hover over a field to read a short description.

   If you're using responsibility centers to administer your company, it can be useful to have a default responsibility center.

4. Choose the icon, enter Company Information, and then choose the related link.

5. On the Shipping FastTab, in the Responsibility Center field, enter a responsibility center code.

This code is used on all purchase, sales, or service documents, if the user, customer, or vendor has no default responsibility center. On sales, purchase, or service documents, you can enter another responsibility center than the default.

Note

When you enter a responsibility center code on a document, it affects the address, dimensions, and prices on the document.

To assign responsibility centers to users

You can set up users so that Business Central retrieves only the documents relevant for their particular work areas. Users are associated with one responsibility center and work only with documents related to specific application areas at that particular center.

To set this up, you assign responsibility centers to users in three functional areas: Purchases, Sales, and Service Management.

1. Choose the icon, enter User Setup, and then choose the related link.
2. On the User Setup page, select the user you want to assign a responsibility center to. If the user not is on the list, you must enter a user ID in the User ID field.
3. In the Sales Resp. Ctr. Filter field, enter the responsibility center where the user will have tasks related to sales.
4. In the Purchase Resp. Ctr. Filter field, enter the responsibility center where the user will have tasks related to purchasing.
5. In the Service Resp. Ctr. Filter field, enter the responsibility center where the user will have tasks related to service management.

Note

Users can view only those posted documents that related to their own responsibility center. However, they can view all ledger entries and navigate to other posted documents from the ledger entries.

See also

Setting Up Inventory
Setting Up Warehouse Management
Inventory
Warehouse Management Overview
Work with Business Central
Define an invoice posting policy for users

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