expenses

[toto2000ff]

Hi,

I have MSProject 2003, how can I handle expenses such as: aifare, meals, car
rental, etc?

thanks!!!

 

[Andrew Lavinsky]

You have a couple of options, but I generally set them up as material
resources in the resource sheet:

Resource: Hotel
Type: Material
Label: Night
Cost: USD 100

Then, in the Gantt Chart view, select a task, split the screen (Window >
Split), and in the bottom left, select your hotel, then under units, enter
"1/d". This will calculate one hotel night for each day of the task. If the
task gets pushed out, then more hotel nights will be calculated.

You can then calculate the cumulative cost for all hotel stays, and count
how many hotel stays, books, rental cars, etc. you have used.

Note this method works on material resources w/ low variability in cost,
i.e. you set up one resource for hotels and it is more or less the same
price. You can of course set up multiple resources for different hotel price
tiers, but that becomes a lot of work.

Or you can use the fixed cost field for the task. The only issue there is
that it doesn't itemize your costs, and you will need to add notes to the
task depicting where those fixed costs came from.....

 

[toto2000ff]

Hi,

Thanks for your help;

How Can I handle next:

I have a baseline including all these costs: expenses, airfare, rental car,
etc. let say a budget, but at the end of the week, I know exaclty how much
was expensed by the team, how can I enter that to MS Project and get a
variance, I mean the planned expenses vs real expensed .

Thanks

 

[Andrew Lavinsky]

1) First, set up your plan w/ the expected expenses.
2) Save the baseline: Tools > Tracking > Set Baseline
3) You have a couple of options for tracking Actuals now:
a. You can use the split screen view in the Gantt Chart to adjust the units
of the material resources. Then you can expose the Cost Variance field on
the Gantt Chart to see the Task cost variance. You can also expose the Cost
Variance field on the Resource Sheet to see the Resource Cost Variance.
b. For completed tasks, you can go to the Task Usage view, right click on
the chart to the right, expose the Actual Cost and Cost fields, and then
enter data in the Actual Cost fields. Note that you can zoom in or out to
enter the data by day, week, or month.
4) If you really want to get fancy, right click on the menu, and expose the
Analysis toolbar. Then select the Export Timescaled Data to Excel option,
and export the cost fields. You may have to move the Status Date to the end
of the project (Project > Project Information). Note that you'll probably
get best results by selecting detail on a weekly basis.

I don't have MPP03 in front of me to test this on, but this should work.

-A