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Cost Centers (Cost Center Association)

flair now manages employee cost centers through Cost Center Associations. This replaces the single Cost Center and Second Cost Center fields on the employee, so an employee can be linked to one or many cost centers at the same time — each with its own allocation percentage and validity dates.

Deprecated fields

The Cost Center and Second Cost Center fields on the Employee object are deprecated.

They are not removed — existing automations, reports, and integrations that reference them keep working. However, you should no longer use them to assign cost centers to new employees. Use the Cost Centers component (Cost Center Association) described below instead.

Managing an employee's cost centers​

Cost centers are now managed directly on the Employee record page through the Cost Centers card:

  1. Open an employee's record page.
  2. In the Cost Centers card, search for and select a cost center.
  3. For each cost center, set:
    • Allocation — the share of the employee assigned to this cost center (as a percentage). When only one cost center is assigned, the allocation is 100%.
    • Start Date — when the assignment becomes valid (optional).
    • End Date — when the assignment ends (optional).
  4. Add as many cost centers as you need, or use the delete action to remove an association.

Because an employee can now have multiple weighted cost centers, this model supports cost splitting that the two flat lookup fields could not.

Automatic migration​

When the flair package is upgraded, a migration runs automatically to move existing data into the new model. For every employee it copies:

  • the Cost Center value into a Cost Center Association, and
  • the Second Cost Center value into a second Cost Center Association,

each with an allocation of 100%. The migration is non-destructive (it never changes or clears the original Cost Center / Second Cost Center fields) and idempotent (re-running it will not create duplicate associations).

Re-running the migration manually​

If the automatic migration did not run, or you want to run it again after restoring data, you can trigger it from Flair Doctor:

How to re-run the migration
  1. Go to the HR Admin page in Salesforce.
  2. Open Flair Doctor and select Re-run migrations (Doctor Migrations). This re-runs post-installation script migrations in the context of the current user.
  3. In the Migration dropdown, select CostCenterAssociationBackfillBatch.
  4. Click Run.

Re-running is safe — the migration only creates the associations that are missing. For more about the diagnostic and repair tools available there, see Flair Doctor.

Permissions​

Access to Cost Center Associations (the Cost_Center_Association__c object and its fields) ships with the Flair Employee Management permission set. Make sure the relevant users have it assigned so they can view and edit cost centers on the employee record page.