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Set up Cost Centres in Xero
Set up Cost Centres in Xero
Michael Colley avatar
Written by Michael Colley
Updated over 8 months ago

You can set up within your Onfolk portal cost centres which automatically sync with your accounting software. If you don't need cost centres but would like to map your payroll costs to your accounting software (Xero or Quickbooks) - check out our article on how to do this instead.

ℹ️ We currently only have this integration enabled with Xero, and are building the functionality for Quickbooks.

How to configure cost centres in Onfolk

1. Create your company's departments

Cost centres in Onfolk mimic how your company's departments are structured. This means that if you'd like to set up your cost centres in a certain way, for eg by discipline (Engineering, Ops, Finance, etc) or by team (Business Operations, Internal Product, etc), you'll need to follow the same logic when setting up your Departments.

2. Set up tracking categories in Xero

Once you've set up Departments in Onfolk, it's time to do the same in Xero. Xero doesn’t have a concept of departments, but instead maps costs according to what they call "tracking categories". Make sure to follow the same logic used for your Departments!


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3. Understand how cost centres appear in your Onfolk portal

First make sure you've connected your Xero to your Onfolk portal - if not, you can do this here.

Once synced with Xero, go into your Xero integration page. This is where your cost centres can be set up and managed.

The page is comprised of:

  • a "Default" view, which lists standard cost mappings between Onfolk categories and Xero codes

  • your Cost Centre tabs, corresponding to each Department, with their own cost mapping settings.

The "Default" tab

This tab acts as the "standard mapping" settings page for every Onfolk category listed and how they each map to Xero codes.


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Each Onfolk category to Xero code mapping can also be overriden in every cost centre tab - see below.


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Cost centre tabs

Cost centre tabs correspond to departments set up in your Company section in Onfolk.

To take the example below, the tabs "Operations" and "Engineering" correspond to the 2 Departments set up:

Company section:

4. Map cost centres to Xero tracking categories

Onfolk will automatically map Onfolk departments to Xero tracking categories, but you can manually update tracking category mappings yourself.

To do this, go into the tab you'd like to update and click on the edit button as follows:

Update the Xero tracking category that corresponds to the Onfolk department, and click save:

5. Set up "Default" Onfolk categories / Xero codes mappings

As mentioned above, the "Default" tab lists the standard set of Onfolk categories / Xero code mappings applied as standard when tracking categories don't include their own Xero codes.


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You can configure your "Default" settings here.


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6. Configure mappings for each cost centre

If your tracking categories in Xero haven't been configured with their own Xero codes, the mappings from the "Default" tab will apply. However if you have set up tracking categories with corresponding codes, those will automatically be applied to the cost centre.

To configure your tracking categories with their own Xero codes within your accounting software, go back to step 2 in this guide.


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πŸ”΄ To manually override a Onfolk category to Xero code mapping in a cost centre, you can follow the same process as for default cost mappings here.

An overidden default mapping in a cost centre will include a tag to confirm this:

πŸ’‘ This override will only take effect for the cost centre you've set up a different cost mapping for. All other tabs will keep the "Default" mapping unless overriden in Xero or manually.

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