ACWP does not always equal Actual Costs

[DavidR]

I am entering Actual Cost manually, and have a status date set in project
information. For most of the task the ACWP equals the amount I am putting in
for Actual Cost as expected. But for some of the task the number is slightly
different. I can not figure out why it is equal for some tasks and different
for others, and have checked everything I can think of. Any suggestions?

 

[Jim Aksel]

Hello DavidR -

There appears to be an undocumented feature within Project2003/2007 where
ACWP may appear to shift. The behavior I have noticed is that ACWP will
spread to the extremes of the time scale for on which the value is entered.
So, if the time scale is Monthes and I have a task that runs January 28 -
February 10-- I enter the January costs ACWP will spread from January 1 to
January 31 while producing variances if you make the time scale more granular
(say by the day). The same is true for February, the costs entered in the
February column spread from Feb1-28 and they should stop at 2/10. This
appears to make the ACWP values change and be incorrect.

Two bug reports were written on 09 JUN 2007 and are still open (I just
checked). You can get more information here:
https://connect.microsoft.com/feedback/default.aspx?SiteID=235

You may need to sign-on with an MSN or Live ID. The two IDs are
282180 and 282182

If you care to, please visit that site and provide some additional feedback
concerning the problem. Microsoft raises the priority of bug fixes when they
get enough attention.

To be a little more specific -- If a task runs Jan 10 through May 15 the
problem will show up in January and May only, the February, March and April
data will be fine.
--
If this post was helpful, please consider rating it.

Jim

Visit http://project.mvps.org/ for FAQs and more information
about Microsoft Project

 

[DavidR]

Jim,

Thanks for this information. This is something to keep an eye on. After
more research I believe my problem may be more related to the status date.
If I change the status date to today ACWP and Actual cost match. So maybe a
better question is how do I enter the Actual cost as of a certain date. I
have a report from our accounting system as of the 31st of Decemeber and I
want to enter it as actual cost as of Dec. 31st in MSP.