cost center

American  

noun

1. any unit of activity, group of employees or machines, line of products, etc., isolated or arranged in order to allocate and assign costs more easily.

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Example Sentences

AI ethics is “seen as a cost center, not a revenue center,” Chowdhury said.

From Washington Post

“For most of these organizations, security is a cost center. It’s a line item on the budget without an immediate benefit. ... You crash and burn, and only then you feel, ‘Oh, I should have had a fire department.’”

From Los Angeles Times

Currently, the software for us is entirely a cost center.

From The Verge

As I said, we are mostly a software company, so the vast majority of our engineering payroll is effectively servicing a cost center, which is interesting.

From The Verge

I know you mentioned that legal departments are a cost center as opposed to a value generator, but we wouldn’t have done this if we didn’t think that there was going to be a very substantial return on investment, maybe not in the immediate future, but in the relatively near future — measured by litigation, which is several years, of course.

From The Verge