Space / Space Chargeback /Shared Workplace Chargeback (Non-Transactional)
Shared Workplace Chargeback Method (Non-Transactional)
Note: This feature is not available in the Archibus SaaS Space module.
So that you can bill departments for the space they use, the Space domain provides tasks for determining the space that an organization occupies and its proportion of common space. The process of charging an organization for the space it occupies and its share of common space is known as chargeback.
With a standard room inventory and chargeback, entire rooms are assigned to one division and department, or are designated as one type of common area. Therefore, there is no way to track changes over time.
In today's environment on telecommuting with workers only in their offices part time, many sites have employees share offices and reserve desks for when they are in the office. This is known as hotdesking or hoteling. Sites might want to extend their room inventory to specify how rooms are shared. They can charge for space according to how the room is shared.
With shared workplace chargeback, a room's space can be shared as a space percentage or as both a space percentage and time percentage. For example:
| Method | Description |
|---|---|
| Space percentage | Multiple departments can share a room’s area. (For example, three departments evenly share a room’s area.) |
| Time percentage | Multiple departments can share a room over time. (For example, for the past year, three departments each used 100% of the room's area for four months.) |
| Space and time percentages | Multiple departments can use a portion of the room for a portion of the year. (For example, for six months, three departments evenly split the room area and for the next six months, two departments evenly split the room area.) |
Note: This topic describes the Shared Workspace Chargeback method available with Archibus pre-V20.1. If you are interested in this method's ability to record space and time percentages, you may wish to enact the workspace transaction features of Archibus. The Workspace Transaction features use a chargeback methodology similar to this method but incorporates additional features, such as the ability to include groups in the chargeback calculations. For information, see Transaction vs. Non-Transaction Methods.
Space Percentages
One option that you have is to share workplace as a space percentage. For example, in one scenario Room 110 is an office in which half of its space is used by the Finance department and the other half is used by the Administrative department. One way to handle this scenario is to draw two polylines, exactly the same size, which divide the total office area in two. You can then identify one polyline as 110-A and the other as 110-B.
Alternatively, with the Manage Shared Workplace Chargeback application, you can outline the room with a single polyline, the way it appears on the floor plan. Then, in the Workspace Transactions table, you can create two records for room 110; one for the Finance department and one for the Administrative department, specifying 50% of the space for each. These two Workspace Transaction records are assigned to the Room record for room 110.
Time Percentages
The above example specified that 50% of the space of room 110 was used by the Finance department, and the remaining 50% was used by the Administrative department. Suppose that this was only true for the first quarter of the year, and that for the remainder of the year, 75% of the space was used by Finance, and 25% was used by Administration.
Use the time fields of the Room Percentages table to document this room's time percentages. You can either enter a time percentage or a date range during which the room is being used. The system will calculate the time percentage by comparing this date range to a date range you specify when updating area totals.
Integration with the Hoteling Application
The Shared Workspace Chargeback process stores space in the Workspace Transactions table. The Workspace Transactions table also holds booked rooms (rooms temporarily used by employees and visitors using the Archibus Hoteling application). Since booked rooms can account for a significant amount of space, you can charge back for booked rooms, just as you would charge for permanently occupied rooms.
If you want to account for booked rooms in your overall space chargeback calculations, you must use the Shared Workspace Chargeback method so that your permanently occupied rooms are documented in the Workspace Transactions table. If you do not share the space in the permanently occupied rooms, you can retain their percentages of 100 percent. See Shared Workplace Chargeback / Allocate Percentages for details on the percentage fields of the Workspace Transactions table.
Procedure
- Prerequisite: Develop a room inventory.
- Define the cost per area of buildings, floors, room categories, and/or rooms. Depending on practices at your site, you can define costs for any combination of these levels using the following tasks:
- Define Cost per Area for Building and Floor
- Define Cost per Area for Room Category and Room
- As part of developing the inventory, you may have already designated groups and rooms as being common areas. If you have not yet done this, you can do so now by running the Standard Chargeback / Designate Common Area Rooms task.
- Automatically create shared room (Workspace Transaction) records for each room record by running Synchronize Shared Rooms.
- Specify how a room is divided by time used, space used, or both time and space used by running Allocate Percentages.
- Have the system update the area totals based on the percentage allocations by running the Update Area Totals - Space and Update Area Totals - Space and Time tasks.
- Have the system determine the financial cost of the space used by each department by running the Perform Chargeback task.
- Examine the chargeback reports.
Note: Shared workplace chargeback requires a room inventory; if your inventory is a mixture of rooms and groups, you cannot use this method.