Cost Center

Everything your railroad paid out in a fiscal year — by category, month, asset, job, and vendor — with each locomotive's cost of use and every year before.

The Cost Center answers the question the treasurer and the board ask: what did we spend this year, on what, and how does it compare with last year? Click Cost Center under Admin in the sidebar. Out of the box it is for administrators; an administrator can open it to general members on Settings & permissions.

The page covers one fiscal year at a time — pick another from the year menu in the header. Fiscal years start in the month set on Settings (January unless you change it) and are named for the calendar year they end in; the page always shows the dates. CSV in the header downloads the year's spending, one line per item.

What counts as spending

Spent means money paid out. It is built from:

Category	Counted from	Dated by
Parts bought	Parts received, at the price paid	when received
Stores — coal, fuel oil, diesel, water, sand, other	Stores purchases	when bought
Fuel & water bought direct	Fills logged not from a store	when logged
Paid labor and Contractor labor	Hours logged for paid staff and contractors, at their rates	the work date
Run costs	Other direct costs recorded on excursions	the run's date

Some things are deliberately not counted, because they would count the same money twice or are not money at all:

Parts fitted on work orders — they were paid for when they were received.
Fuel and water drawn from a store — paid for when the store was stocked.
Count corrections after a stocktake.
Volunteer time — shown beside the total as in-kind value, never added to it.

A receipt or purchase with no price is valued at its requisition's estimate when it has one, and marked as estimated. Otherwise it is counted under Needs a price and left out of the total — never quietly shown as $0. Give it a price and it joins the total.

The tiles

Spent — the fiscal year's total, and for the current year, how it compares with last year to the same day.
Volunteer time — the in-kind value of volunteer hours. Not spent, and not in the total.
Committed (current year) — what is still to arrive on requisitions that are approved, ordered, or partly received, at their estimates, with a count of lines that have no estimate.
Needs a price — receipts or fills with no cost, and how many were priced from a requisition estimate.

Breakdown

Breakdown splits the year's spending five ways; pick one across the top of the card:

Category — the categories in the table above.
Month — each month of the fiscal year.
Asset — each locomotive, car, or shop area.
Job — each work order, inspection, or run.
Vendor — who was paid.

Each group shows this year, last year, and the change, with a bar for its share. Click a group to list every line in it — date, item, category, what it was for, and amount — with a link to the record it came from.

Spent by month and fiscal years

Spent by month shows each month of the year with a bar. Fiscal years lists every year with any spending, with what was spent and the volunteer time alongside; click a year to open it.

Where it went, by locomotive

This table shows what each locomotive cost to run and keep during the year:

Maintenance labor — paid hours on its work orders and inspections.
Parts fitted — parts consumed on its work orders.
Fuel & water used — every fill, at its price.
Share of runs — an even share of each run's paid hours and run costs, split across the locomotives in the consist.

This is cost of use, not spending. It includes stock bought in earlier years and leaves out stock still on the shelf, so it is not added to what was spent. Cars and general shop work are in the spending totals above.

Largest items

The ten biggest lines of the year, each linked to its record — the place to start when a total looks wrong.

Spending is only as complete as your records. Receive parts and stores against requisitions (or with a price), give paid staff and contractors their hourly rate on the roster, and record run costs on each excursion, and the Cost Center fills itself in.

Settings & permissions — the fiscal year start.
Requisitions & vendors
Labor & volunteer hours
Excursions & runs