Background
A leading provider of logistics services decided to use Gelato to support their marketing and sales outposts around the globe. With over 4 500 employees and a global logistics network covering over 300 destinations, the company has offices spread over 6 continents.
The marketing and sales departments require several collaterals - such as brochures, posters, roll ups - to support their promotional and sales campaigns. The possibility to control their brand centrally and ensure a reduced delivery time for printed material to different locations were among the main reasons for them to select Gelato as a partner for this initiative.
Local billing and cost centers
As part of the Gelato implementation project, they decided to enable local billing in the different countries they operate in. However in many of these countries they are present with multiple offices, for each of which they wish to monitor the print activity and expenditure.
The solution recommended by our team includes the creation of one billing entity per country - associated with the legal entity registered in that country - linked to several cost centers, one per office (see example below).
Note: All the invoices are sent to the invoice email address associated with the legal entity, but they indicate which cost center is associated with each order.
About cost centers
Cost centers are simple strings of text, numbers, or a combination of the two, used to identify the office or department that placed a specific order. They can be defined and pre-loaded on your Gelato account by your finance department or account admin based on your internal accounting structure, and then are available for users to select during the checkout process.
E.g. If a user in the U.S. is paying an order with invoice, during the checkout flow he will be asked to select a billing entity among the ones visible to him depending on account settings - in this example XYZ Inc. As a next step the system will ask the user to select one cost center among the ones linked to that billing entity - in this example: 13296, 13487, 13647, 13535.
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