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Designate Common Area Rooms and Groups
Note: The Space module does not support groups. Space module users designate common area rooms only.
A key component of the Archibus chargeback system is to divide the cost of common areas to the departments using these areas. This ensures that the cost of all common areas is covered by the departments that use these areas.
The share that each department must pay for their use of a common area is based on the size of the space that the department occupies. For example, if a department occupies 75 percent of a floor, and the floor contains a conference room available to all departments on the floor, the department should pay for 75 percent of the cost of this conference room. Likewise, a department occupying the remaining 25 percent of the floor would pay for 25 percent of the cost of the conference room.
In order to charge departments for their share of common area, you must designate rooms and groups as being common to the entire floor, building, or site. To set a room or group as common area:
- Do not complete its Department Code or Division Code fields.
- Set its Prorate field to a value of FLOOR, BUILDING, or SITE.
Both rooms and groups contain a Prorate field for specifying whether or not the area is common area, and if it is common area, how to distribute this area.
You can set a group's or room's Prorate to one of these values:
| Value | Description |
|---|---|
| NONE | If the group or room represents a specific departmental area, and not a shared area, set the Prorate to NONE. The chargeback routine will charge the room or group's department for this area. Be sure to assign a division and department to the group or room if you set this value as the Prorate. |
| FLOOR | By setting a Prorate field to FLOOR, you are designating that this area is shared by the departments on the floor. Typical examples of floor common areas are lounges and reception areas that serve all departments on a floor. |
| BUILDING | By setting a Prorate field to BUILDING, you are designating that this area is shared by all the departments within the building. A typical example of building common area is an auditorium or business center serving all departments in the building. |
| SITE | By setting a Prorate field to SITE, you are designating that this area is shared by all departments across the facility site. A mail center serving all departments across the site is an example. |
Procedure
You can designate rooms and groups as common areas by setting the Prorate field when working with the Define Locations and Define Groups tasks of the Space Inventory application. Typically, most sites set the Prorate field as part of the Space Inventory application because the space inventory reports document common areas.
However, if common areas were not defined as part of the Space Inventory application, you can designate common areas as part of the Space Chargeback application by following this procedure.
- Select one of these tasks:
- Designate Common Area for Rooms
- Designate Common Area for Groups (non-SaaS only)
- Drill down through the room categories and room types to select the room that you want to designate as common area. Or, drill down through the Group Standards to select the group that you want to designate as common area.
- The system displays the room or group in the right pane.
- Set the Prorate field to FLOOR, BUILDING, or SITE.
- Save your changes.
Note: The Designate Common Area Rooms and Designate Common Area Groups tasks both offer Add New buttons for adding new rooms and groups. Typically, you will add groups through the drawing so that you can depict their areas with polylines. If you add rooms through this task, you will need to run the Space Inventory / Room Inventory / Define Locations task or Space Console task and enter the Room Area Manual Entry field. You must then run the Update Room Area from Manual Area task, which copies this value to the Room Area field .
Note: When designating your rooms as common areas, be sure to review your vertical penetrations (rooms with a Room Category whose Super Category is Vertical Penetration). Since vertical penetrations are part of the building structure, departments do not need to pay for them. Therefore, your vertical penetration areas should have a Prorate value of NONE and not have a division or department assignment.
Service areas, on the other hand, hold areas such as lobbies, rest rooms, and mechanical closets hat are used by departmental employees, These areas are common areas that should be charged back to departments. They should have a Prorate value other than NONE and should not have a division or department assignment.