Analyzing costs by cost center
Grouping the Fleet Cost Cockpit by cost center (Kostenstelle) lets you see fleet spend the way your finance team does — per department or accounting unit — and compare it against budget. This article covers how cost-center attribution works and how to read the budget-vs-actual view.
Switch to the Cost center dimension
Set the dimension to Cost center and choose a period. The cockpit produces one bucket per cost-center code, each with its own total and category split, sorted by total cost with the highest first. This tells you which department or unit carries the most fleet cost.
How costs reach a cost center
A cost record can carry its own cost center, or inherit one:
- Receipts (Belege) carry the cost center booked on the document.
- Damage line items and leasing contracts can specify a cost center directly.
- Fuel can carry a cost center from the refuelling record.
- Fines are attributed to the penalty notice's department allocation.
- When a cost has no cost center of its own but is tied to a vehicle, it inherits the vehicle's cost center. This is how maintenance and most fuel land in the correct Kostenstelle.
Note: Costs that still can't be matched to a cost center appear under (unassigned). A large (unassigned) bucket usually means some vehicles have no cost center set, or some fines have no department — fix the source data to move that spend into the right bucket.
Budget vs actual by cost center
The cockpit compares each cost center's actual spend against an annual budget from the fleet budget table. The default budget view is by cost center for the current year. Each row shows:
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Budget | The cost center's planned amount for the year. |
| Actual | Costs collected for that cost center in the year. |
| Variance | Budget minus actual — positive is under budget, negative is over. |
| Utilization % | Actual ÷ budget × 100, to one decimal; blank when no budget is set. |
Cost centers that have a budget but no spend, and those with spend but no budget, both appear in the list so nothing is missed. The view also totals budget and actual across all rows.
Tip: Budget vs actual is always annual. To watch a cost center trending toward its limit mid-year, read utilisation together with how far through the year you are — 60% utilisation in June is on track, but 60% in February is not.
Managing the budgets
The budgets that drive this view are annual and can be scoped to a cost center, a specific vehicle, or the whole fleet. Creating or changing them requires the fleetcost:budget:manage permission, which is separate from viewing.
Permissions
Viewing cost-center analysis and budget-vs-actual requires fleetcost:view; managing budgets requires fleetcost:budget:manage. Both are typically held by the FleetManager role and enforced by [RequirePermission].
Related
- Interpreting the cost KPIs
- Total cost of ownership per vehicle
- Exporting cost data to CSV
- How costs are aggregated across sources
