Re: Assessing Costs in MS Project 2000

John has just about said it all, or offered a solution for each of your
issues... but ..
It's worth keeping the rules in mind so you don't find yourself working
against the software.
Fixed costs are the way they are regarding the (non) rollup.
They are useful for adding costs to a Task or a Summary which do not arise
from Resources or depend on Duration. But they are not for everything.
Work Type Resources always end up expressed as Work hours.
Material Type Resources don't.
Sometimes it is useful to make a Resource a Material type Resource, even
though it is strictly not just a "Material", such as a supply and install
subcontractor to prevent

My VBA is just about non-existent, so I have to accept that a
separation/dissection of labour and material costs in the Gantt Chart View
is just out of reach.
But the data is still available in other forms such as Task Usage and
Resource Usage Views, Reports, and especially Groups and Filters.
In the Resource ***, and Grouping by Work Vs Material, with the Resources
Cost Table pretty much gets us there, doesn't it?
And all this is built-in functionality without resort even to custom fields
and functions and formulae.
Fluid and constant switching between Views and Tables, and creating and
editing them, and same for Filters, Groups and Reports, is pretty much
essential.
Keeping this neat requires some housekeeping discipline.

It's also possible to just make a separate version or versions of the
project file with all of the Material Resources, or any selection of
Resources, just deleted from the Resources ***, leaving the cost of what's
left.

Trevor Rabey 0407213955 61 8 92729485 PERFECT PROJECT PLANNING
www.perfectproject.com.au
"DGD" <ddubowski@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1184370476.106307.228720@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I am laying out a project plan and am trying to determine a few
things. First, I would like to get a roll up of the labour costs
associated with a project. I have added an additional column and
assigned the "Cost" field to it. This is the only way to list the
costs of the project that I can find. The problem that I have is that
the "cost" field appears to be pre-programmed to to calculate total
costs, meaning the sum of resources and fixed costs allocated to a
task. I want to be able to assign resource costs to a user
configurable field, like "cost1, cost2, etc" but the resource costs
never appear when I try this. They seem to only be programmed to
appear in the "cost" field, and given that it is pre-programmed to add
both resource and fixed costs, trying to separate the two costs is
really problematic.

When I use the fixed cost column, I can never get the fixed costs to
roll up to get a summary, regardless of level. They are there in the
task row, but just won't roll up to higher level tasks or the top
summary line. Don't understand what going on here.

The third problem I am having is trying to allocate daily expenses.
For instance, on a trip there are $200/day per diem I want to assign
for the duration of the trip. If the trip was 6 days long, I would
allocate 600% of the per diem rate to generate a cost of $1,200
dollars. The resource called "per diem" has a $200/use identified in
the resource ***. It totals up the numbers nicely, but for some
reason, it also allocates 6 days of work in the "work" column, skewing
my level of effort numbers. I can treat them as fixed costs, but it
is a pain to go in and get to the tables to enter fixed costs. If I
change the length of the trip, I have to go to 2 different places to
update the project plan - the resource allocation and the fixed cost
tables. Are there any easier ways of doing this?

Any help greatly appreciated.

Doug



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