You specify pool cost accounts on the Pool Cost subtask of the Manage Cost Pools screen.

Costpoint provides a selection list composed of all account/org combinations in your Chart of Accounts.

If the selection list is greater than 1,000 combinations (rows), you can click to narrow the range of account/organization combinations. After your selection list is less than 1,000 combinations (rows), it is displayed in the left-hand table-window. Highlight and select the account/org combinations that form the cost portion of the pool. As you make selections, those selections are deleted from the selection list in the left-hand table window. You cannot use an account/organization combination as a cost account/organization in the same allocation group more than once. You should consider the cost pool structure when you initialize your chart of accounts, as it makes maintenance of the cost pools more efficient. You can also use the Manage Cost Creation Setups and Create Pool Links screens to set up cost pools. See the screen documentation for more details on how to use these processes.

If the pool that you are creating is a company-wide pool, you must select account combinations that are attached to every lowest level organization number for the company (1.1.1, 1.1.2, 1.1.3, 1.2.1, 1.2.2, and so forth). You cannot use Organization 1 to denote a company-wide pool, because Costpoint only uses costs POSTED to the account/organization combinations that are specified on the Pool Cost subtask to calculate the cost to be allocated. Because cost is not normally posted against Organization 1 but is posted at the lowest level of your organization tree, you should specify that lowest level here. This is also true of accounts. If you are posting cost at Level 3 of your account number, do not specify Level 1 here.

If your company posts costs at both the lowest levels of their organization tree and at summary levels, include all account/organization combinations from the levels charges when setting up the pool cost and/or base for a company-wide pool.

If the pool is a divisional pool, the level of the organization selected must correspond with the lowest level of that division (1.1.1).

Remember that, if you want both company-wide and divisional level rates calculated, you can use Allocation Group 1 for the "real" set of rates (the ones you want to apply to jobs and use for billing) and Allocation Group 2 (or whatever number you want) for the "informational" set.

Remember that you can easily set up cost pools using the Manage Cost Creation Setups screen and the Create Pool Links screen. You can use wildcards on the Manage Cost Creation Setups screen. For example, you can set up an indirect labor account (05000-100) in all organizations using a wildcard. Enter account 05000-100 with an organization of 1%, and all 05000-100 accounts linked to an organization beginning with 1 are set up in the pool.