Microsoft Project Resource Costings

Costings

Do you need to cost the project?

Is this the package in which you want to hold the information?

(If the person can open the file, they can also see all the information – costings might be confidential information that you want to restrict access to.)

Do you wish to have the costing information or the charging info?

These questions need to be answered before Microsoft Project should be used for costings.

Task or Resource Cost

Is the cost associated with a task or a resource? When deciding how the cost figures are to be entered decisions need to be made as to how detailed the resource list is going to be.

Is every particular cost going to be listed as a resource or will some costs be entered a single cost figure against the task. Within Project a task can only have one fixed cost – but the single fixed cost can be a link to an Excel Spreadsheet where the individual items can be manipulated.

Cost Table

If the project plan has been resourced, and the resources have costs allocated to them, the tasks will have a cost figure against the tasks.

The cost figure will be generated from       cost rate*hours worked

This will be calculated from each resource on each task.

If a fixed cost needs to be entered against a task then it can be added intro the Fixed Cost column against the appropriate task.

The accrual method can be typed in as well.

Any fixed cost that is entered will also be included into the Total Cost column as this is a combination of Fixed and Resource Cost.

Resource costs

The resource costs are calculated in different ways depending on the type of resource it is. Work is a multiple of rate and hours worked.

Material is a multiple of quantity of units and cost per unit (entered on the resource sheet).

Cost, here when a resource of this type is entered, the cost associated with it is also entered either on the Task information or the Assign resources dialog box.