ebarbieri said:
Being a novice with Project, I just want to input estimate and actual costs
and obtain a variance for each task and a roll up for each group of tasks and
the whole project. To do this, I found I had to use Baseline cost for
estimate, fixed cost for actual, and then calculate the variance. This
enabled me to input the estimate(baseline) and actual costs(fixed) and obtain
the variance for each task, but I am unable to rollup the totals by group and
the overall project.
Any advice would be much appreciated.
Ed
Ed,
Well first of all you aren't using the best fields for what you want to
do. Apparently you are not using Project's normal process for
calculating costs, namely, each task is assigned one or more resources
that has a defined pay rate. Project then calculates the Cost field
using the formula: Resource units x resource rate.
The Fixed Cost field is normally used for non-labor costs such as: fixed
price contract effort, fixed material cost, travel costs, etc.
Baseline cost is normally used to "capture" the original plan cost. It
can then be used for comparison to actual cost as the plan progresses.
This is most often done using classical earned values metrics such as:
BCWS, BCWP, ACWP, CPI, etc. There is also a cost variance (CV) field in
Project that pretty much does what you want. As a first suggestion, you
should read about earned value in Project's help file. You might also
want to go to our MVP website at:
http://www.mvps.org/project/links.htm
and take a look at fellow MVP, Mike Glen's series on Project lessons and
techniques. Module 13 of Mike's series cover the subject of cost.
Nonetheless, if you simply want to track your own costs you can do the
following:
1. Designate two spare cost fields (e.g. Cost1 & Cost2) for your
estimate and actual cost values.
2. Designate a third spare cost field (e.g Cost3) as a custom field
(Tools/Customize/Fields) and insert the following formula:
Cost3=Cost2-Cost1 [or something similar]
3. While still in the Customize Fields window, set the Calculation for
task and group summary rows to: "Use Formula"
Hope this helps,
John
Project MVP
