Hello All,

Just hoping to get some insight as to what costs you are rolling into the object "Other Cost Pools" in the model. My team is moving towards refining our model and now have a "vendor" object that covers a large ground. However, I'm not sure if it's the best option to really roll the majority of costs through "vendor."

Hi, Richard.

My model has everything that is not labor, maintenance, SaaS, and depreciation rolling through the Other Cost Pools object.  A fair amount of cost, some of it tied to vendors and some of it not.  At this point, my model is not really dependent on vendors to drive costs anywhere.

As it relates to a Vendor object, I'm just stepping into that mine field as well.  I've created a Supplier object, and I have cost going into it so that I can generate a total vendor cost, but it stops there.  I don't allocate cost out of that object.  So, I'm allocating some costs out of the Cost Source object at 200%, once to go up the Cost model, and once to go over to the Supplier object.  I'm not sure if this is the best approach, but it's working for me for now.  Whether or not I eventually integrate the Supplier object into my Cost model to drive costs up the model, time will tell.  But for now, it gives me vendor reporting ability without having to spend a ton of time rebuilding my model.

Thanks for the feedback James. I'm in a position where the majority of our costs are vendor driven and putting them in "Other Costs Pools" doesn't make sense. However, Allocating out just to see the cost of Vendors and cutting the cord there is actually a interesting viewpoint. Thanks for sharing!

Hi Richard,

Standard approach for other cost pool object is anything other than labor, outside services (vendor) and depreciation goes through. Because generally we don't have enough information about those line items in GL we just map the cost centers to IT Resource Tower - Sub-towers. Having a vendor object helps you to light up the vendor dashboard and see your vendor spend and does not really hurt to allocate them to vendor object and then it resource towers. There is no benefit to send them through other cost pool object, none of the standard reports report of off other cost pools. If mapping them to IT resource towers from Vendor object is a problem you can always expose your cost centers at vendor object level and use the same mapping as other cost pools to IT Towers.

That being said, James's approach is not so uncommon, for reporting purposes it might have been useful, but  as James indicated in the long run the vendor spend can be mapped to IT resource towers too.

Hope this helps...