Charge shipping back to departments

How a school, college or university charges each shipment to the right department or account, reports spend by department and campus, and gives its finance office the totals with GL accounts.

Your name for the charge

Shipping Center calls the thing a shipment is charged to a tracking dimension, and your institution names it: departments, accounts, chart strings or anything else. That name then appears on the ship forms, approvals, History, reports and menus. This article says department.

When the department is the dimension that drives GL, or is marked required at ship time, a shipment without one is refused. Nobody can type a code that is not on the list.

Where the department comes from

• What is in the box. An item in the content catalog can carry its department, so picking "Admissions viewbooks" charges Admissions, whoever sends it. The shipper can still change it.
• The shipper's choice. For the dimension that drives GL, the shipper picks from the departments assigned to their office, not the whole list.
• Filled in for you. Other dimensions are filled in automatically. A shipper changes them only if their role includes the right to override them.

A shipment can carry more than one department, for example a box shared by two labs. The cost is split evenly unless the shipper sets shares with Split cost.

Set up the list

An administrator works under Manage:

1. Tracking Dimensions lists each dimension: its label, whether it is required, its carrier slot (the reference field it prints in) and whether it drives GL.
2. The menu entry with your plural name, for example Departments, lists every value with its Code, Name, GL account and External ref. Shippers never see the GL account.
3. For the dimension that drives GL, departments loaded by a cost center import in Imports wait on Pending Departments until you say where they may be charged from. Tick them, choose under Charge them from, and choose Release. A released department can be charged from that campus or college and everything below it.
4. Deactivating a department keeps it on the shipments that already carry it, so past reports do not change.

Under Carrier References, a reference field can be filled from the department so it prints on the label and comes back on the carrier's invoice. UPS carries reference slots 1 and 2, and FedEx slots 1 to 3.

Report spend by department and campus

Open Insights, Shipping Analysis, choose a date range and group by department, campus, office, college or any other level, carrier, service, content item, or day, week or month. Every row opens History with exactly the shipments it counted. A shipment charged to two departments is counted under each, but its cost is split, so spend still adds up to the total. Amounts show only for people whose role includes costs.

• Export CSV exports the analysis as you see it.
• GL export, where your institution uses it and you see costs across the whole institution, gives one line per department charge in the date range, with its GL account and amount, ready for your finance office.
• Faster Than Needed shows delivered shipments that paid for a faster service than they needed. See Reports and the Audit Trail.