Cost centres are a way to allocate discounts that are applied by staff to a specific group or area of your business.

As an example, if you wanted to provide £1000 worth of free vouchers as part of a charity raffle, the product would still have a cost for you, so you would like to work out in which area of the business that will be used by and be able to allocate a cost or spend. In this instance I would create a cost centre and call it 'marketing'. Now, any vouchers that are being sent out as a part of that by staff, can be assigned to that, meaning im able to track how much the marketing team is spending on their gift voucher marketing efforts.

This can also be the case for complains, where staff are able to assign free or discounted vouchers to 'complaints', 'front of house' etc.