Overview:

Work Centres are a core part of Workbench's Work Breakdown structure, taking their spot between Jobs and Activities. This screen is where you can add to the global list of Work Centres, making them available to be assigned during the Job Setup Wizard process or later in Job Maintenance.

In general, Work Centres are considered groupings of costs that represent an area of your job that you wish to analyse in future Management Reports. They are used for Job Budgeting, Purchasing, and Billing analysis. An important note about Work Centres is that they can be labelled as a static list, i.e. "Demolition" through "Final Clean" for builders while removing irrelevant items for each job, or generically, i.e. "Stage 1", "Stage 2", etc. for civil construction, then customise the description for each individual project. Since Workbench organises data based on the Code rather than the Description, two different jobs can have the same code with different descriptions, enabling data comparison while ensuring the area of work makes sense for each project. There isn't a single methodology for creating Work Centres and the setup will vary from company to company. There are however best practices for specific types of businesses, so if you are unsure, please contact your consultant.

While this level is a required field in all transactions, you can make only one generic Work Centre available when creating a Job if your company will not use them on a particular project.

Screen Guide:

• Code is the shorthand for the Work Centre and must be unique. Alphanumeric characters are allowed.
• Description is the default global description for the Work Centre, but this can be changed during the Job Setup Wizard process or later in Job Maintenance.
• Work Centre Group is an optional field and is populated using Work Centre Groups. Essentially, this field adds a grouping layer to Work Centres, making it easier to report on multiple groups within a Job.
• The Bin icon is used to delete one or more lines - simply tick the checkbox on the line you want to delete and click Save.

Next Steps:

Now that you've added Work Centres, you can use them in the Job Setup Wizard or add them to existing Jobs in Job Maintenance.

If you want to delete a Work Centre and the system produces an error, it is likely that it has been used in a transaction or is in the Work Centre list of a Job. There is a Utility available to retroactively change Work Centres within a Job or globally, but this must be used with extreme caution. Contact the support team if you need assistance with data changes.