Cost centers and cost distribution

A cost center is where a cost accumulates: a field, a machine, a warehouse, a plant or an administrative area. With good cost centers you can see profitability by field, by crop and by cycle.

What Aragro assigns on its own

Aragro creates cost centers for your fields, machinery, infrastructure and warehouses, and assigns costs automatically by document:

• Work order: labor, inputs and machinery go to the order’s fields (or assets). If fertilizing was done on fields 1 and 2, the cost is split between those two.
• Machinery: usage is costed with each machine’s standard cost (per hour or kilometer) times the hours recorded on the order. Without a standard cost, the machinery report stays empty. The operator’s wage is a separate labor cost.
• Payroll: if the structure has accounts assigned, completing it splits the cost across the period’s work orders.

Costs that don’t belong to a single field

Case	How to record it
Supervision, security, kitchen	General work order, picking every cost center that benefits. Aragro splits by the days and hours recorded.
Fixed-salary supervisors	Record them on work orders. Otherwise their salary stays as an unassigned cost. You can duplicate the order each day and only update attendance.
Maintenance by your staff	Infrastructure work order on the asset (road, fence, warehouse).
Supplier or contractor invoice	Expense order, splitting the amount across the affected cost centers.
Inputs for a period without detail by activity	Work order with a generic Input consumption activity, picking the cycle and field.
Administrative expenses (stationery, office)	Expense order assigned to an administrative cost center.

See Work order types and Contractors, services and costs outside the work order.

Build your hierarchy

You can create your own structure in Finance → Cost centers, for example with your accounting codes:

• Parent centers, such as Administration (code 10).
• Child centers linked to the parent, such as Stationery (code 1001).

If you don’t want a center tied to a fixed category, leave the Link cost center to field empty. You then choose the center on each transaction.

Ideas that work

• One center per field to see crop stage changes and cost per field.
• Plants and mills as infrastructure (for example, Wet mill), with their machinery recorded individually (Pulper 1, Pulper 2), to see the real processing cost.
• Central operations as their own farm (for example, a sawmill or a shared workshop), if you don’t want their costs charged to the farm where they are located.

Reviewing costs

• Cost reports by field, activity and machinery show what was assigned to each center.
• For payroll detail by activity, export the detailed report and use a pivot table in Excel.
• If a cost doesn’t appear, check that the document is completed and that your accounting setup is ready.

If you have a question this guide does not answer, contact us in the Aragro chat or write to [email protected].