Zahara Planning Guide

Zahara Planning Guide

Planning Guide 

This guide is designed to help you plan your roll out of Zahara. It explains principles and has a matrix of the different elements of Zahara. Click the link below in blue to download the PDF. 



The biggest challenge for a lot of new Zahara customers is how to get the structure right to suit your business. There is no wrong or right way. Our recommendation is to understand the different elements and how they all fit together in Zahara. This is why the PDF guide above has to be read. The 'rules of thumb' though are as below: 

Business Units 

Business Units are generally companies in your accounts system. They are designed to align with what you already have. So if you have 6 x companies in Sage or Xero, create 6 x corresponding Business Units in Zahara. They can be used in other ways as well. Users are allocated to a Business Unit and the Divisions inside the BU. Business Units can be secured and hidden from users who aren't members. 

Divisions 

Divisions are the natural groupings of people inside the organisation. This could be remote offices or departmental functions like IT, Marketing or Finance. The main thing with our Divisions is that you allocate people to the Division and then create approval workflows for that Division. Nobody has an individual spend limit, the Division has the approval workflow as a group. You can create both invoices and Orders where the Division value is separate per line item. This facilitates purchases with multiple Budget allocations or multiple concurrent approvals. 

Projects 

Projects are a horizontal ring-fencing of spend, that sits across the Divisions. You can restrict which Divisions can spend against the project. Each line item of a Purchase or Invoice can have a separate Project code making them versatile values. 

Budgets 

Budgets can be created and allocated to Division or a Project. 

Cost Codes 

Call them what you want and use them in any way you want, Zahara's costs codes are a line-level analysis field that can be used for different things like Department Codes or Trackign Categories. You know what you need. 

Custom Fields

You can create custom fields for Purchases and Invoices and their values can be used in workflows. It could be you want a buying category - like Opex & Capex or it could be you need to record a vehicle registration number for every invoice. These values are "above the line" though. 


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