Ability to roll up costs to a line item on project plan

[ebarbieri]

I am a neophyte with MP, and have begun to use this excellent tool in
building our new house.
I would like to be able to input individual actual costs as they occur,
rolling them up to a line item on our project plan, and then compare this
subtotal with our budget for each line item.
Is there a simple way of doing this?
Ed

 

[John]

I am a neophyte with MP, and have begun to use this excellent tool in
building our new house.
I would like to be able to input individual actual costs as they occur,
rolling them up to a line item on our project plan, and then compare this
subtotal with our budget for each line item.
Is there a simple way of doing this?
Ed

Ed,
Sure. First set up all your tasks with resources to get the cost values.
These will be your initial estimate (i.e. budget). Go to
Tools/Tracking/Save Baseline. That will capture your initial estimates
into a separate field called Baseline Cost.

Then, since you are new to Project, I suggest you add the following
fields as columns in the current view (right click/insert): Cost, Actual
Cost, Cost Variance, Remaining Cost and Baseline Cost. If you hover your
mouse over the heading of each column, a pop up for a quick link to the
Project help file will appear. In each help topic you can read about
Project's cost fields, what they are used for and how they are
calculated.

For your actual cost values you probably want to go to
Tools/Options/Calculation tab and uncheck the box that says, "Actual
costs are always calculated by Microsoft Office Project." Then use the
Actual Cost field to enter your actual cost values.

As you enter progress on each task, (i.e. % Complete), you can also
enter incremental actual cost values although you might want to wait
until the task is complete before entering actual cost, otherwise the
Cost field will appear larger than you are expecting. When each task is
complet, the Cost Variance field will display the difference between
your budget and actual costs.

For reference, you might also want to go to our MVP website at:
http://www.mvps.org/project/links.htm
and check out fellow MVP, Mike Glen's link for tutorials.

Hope this helps.
John
Project MVP

 

[ebarbieri]

Thank you for such a quick response, John. I guess I did not explain myself
adequately. Let me give you an example of what I am trying to do.
I will be making several payments on anyone task, example; Foundation
-estimated cost of $200K.
I would like to record each payment with the check number: Jan 1'06 ck 101
$60K; Feb 12'06 ck202 $100K; Mar22'06 ck 303 $45K; and show on the
"foundation task" the accumulated amount at that time and the variance, which
at the end of March is a total cost of $205K and over budget by $5K. I
can't find in MP where you can add and view the individual paymnents or costs
incurred, so that one can keep a tab on the detail behind the total cost
incurred.
I hope this is a little clearer. Many thanks in any event.
Ed

 

[John]

Thank you for such a quick response, John. I guess I did not explain myself
adequately. Let me give you an example of what I am trying to do.
I will be making several payments on anyone task, example; Foundation
-estimated cost of $200K.
I would like to record each payment with the check number: Jan 1'06 ck 101
$60K; Feb 12'06 ck202 $100K; Mar22'06 ck 303 $45K; and show on the
"foundation task" the accumulated amount at that time and the variance, which
at the end of March is a total cost of $205K and over budget by $5K. I
can't find in MP where you can add and view the individual paymnents or costs
incurred, so that one can keep a tab on the detail behind the total cost
incurred.
I hope this is a little clearer. Many thanks in any event.
Ed

Ed,
Yes, more information is likely to get a better answer. What you are
asking Project to do is act like an accounting program and it was not
designed for that. Excel would be a much better application to keep
track of costs the way you want if you don't want to use an actual
accounting application. Nonetheless what you are asking for can be done
in rudimentary form by using spare fields for the data and a couple more
spare fields customized with formulas.

Here is how you might implement your cost tracking in Project. I assume
you have a good idea ahead of time as to how many payments you will be
making. Designate that number of spare cost fields and that number of
spare text fields. You can even name them, Pay1, Chk1, Pay2, Chk2 and so
forth. Then customize another spare cost field with a formula that
simply adds the values from all the payment fields. You can also
customize another spare cost field with a formula that provides the
difference between the baseline and your summed up cost field.

Project has a total of 10 spare cost fields you can use but if that
isn't enough you can dump some of the excess data into spare text
fields. Just be aware that the spare cost fields are specifically
formatted for cost. If you end up using spare text fields for some cost
data, you will need to format it yourself.

Hope this helps.
John
Project MVP

 

[ebarbieri]

That's a great help, John. It would be helpful if MP did provide a limited
ability to add and note fixed costs on a project and yet not turn into an
accounting program. Although Excel would do the roll up more easily, I
wanted to contain all my project information in one program and print out.
Consequently your suggestion is most helpful. Many thanks,
Ed

 

[John]

That's a great help, John. It would be helpful if MP did provide a limited
ability to add and note fixed costs on a project and yet not turn into an
accounting program. Although Excel would do the roll up more easily, I
wanted to contain all my project information in one program and print out.
Consequently your suggestion is most helpful. Many thanks,
Ed

Ed,
You're welcome. Yes, there are always a lot of suggestions for Microsoft
to add this or that feature to one or more of its user applications. I
think generally, when multiple users make a similar request, there is a
good probably of that feature being incorporated into a future version.

Meanwhile, MS applications can communicate with one another. Sometimes
it is through OLE links, import/export wizards, or for even more
functionality, VBA. With Project I find that many users interface with
Excel and vice versa. The bottom line is that there is already a lot of
built-in functionality to share data between applications and thus
utilize the strong points of each application.

John
Project MVP

 

[aaren]

I had one more thought in addition to what John mentioned. There is a
field called Note for each task. You need to double click on a task
and one of the tabs would be 'Notes'. You could enter additional
details that you might like to enter.

HTH.

 

[John]

I had one more thought in addition to what John mentioned. There is a
field called Note for each task. You need to double click on a task
and one of the tabs would be 'Notes'. You could enter additional
details that you might like to enter.

HTH.

aaren,
Yes the Notes field is a good place to enter additional information such
as scheduled payments. However, the values entered in the Notes field
cannot be automatically summed up and/or used in a calculation and I
think that is what Ed wanted.

John

 

[Shobha]

I'm having trouble with the rollups for my baseline costs. The subtasks
costs are correct (pulling to BAC), however the summary level tasks are not
rolling up.

I've selected the Rollup Baseline option when I save the Baseline, however
it is still not rolling up. Any assistance is greatly appreciated.

Shobha

 

[John]

I'm having trouble with the rollups for my baseline costs. The subtasks
costs are correct (pulling to BAC), however the summary level tasks are not
rolling up.

I've selected the Rollup Baseline option when I save the Baseline, however
it is still not rolling up. Any assistance is greatly appreciated.

Shobha

Shobha,
If a baseline is saved for the entire project, summary rollups occur
automatically. Apparently you are saving a baseline for selected tasks.
Therefore are you sure you have selected those tasks whose baseline data
is NOT rolling up?

Something else you should check. I don't remember if this was an issue
that was fixed with an update but if you are using Project 2003, make
sure you have update SP-2 installed.

John
Project MVP