cost centre

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cost centre

a group of machines, a factory department or some other organizational sub-unit of a firm under the control of a manager, for which costs can be ascertained and used for purposes of COST CONTROL. See STANDARD COST, PROFIT CENTRE, REVENUE CENTRE.

cost centre

an organizational subunit of a firm that is given responsibility for minimizing COSTS but has no control over its product pricing and revenues. Cost centres facilitate management control by helping to ascertain a unit's operating costs. See PROFIT CENTRE, INVESTMENT CENTRE.

Collins Dictionary of Economics, 4th ed. © C. Pass, B. Lowes, L. Davies 2005

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While cost-centre costing and/or ABC may be adequate for an organisation that delivers its strategy through cost centres, it does not account so effectively for the costs to organisations where staff work across divisions.

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It is a comprehensive, covering most of the specific functions of our industry, including accounting, cost centres, profit centres, forecasting, order processing, third party packaging, inventory management, production planning, purchasing, product recall, Green Point (packaging waste management), Pallet management; etc.

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The next step was to allocate cost centres to "buckets" of costs and then to "cost collectors".

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