You may have some difficuluty with this, trying to force a square peg down a
round hole for which it was not designed. Remember that MSP is NOT project
accounting software, it is work scheduling and cost of work estimating
software. It deals with actuals so that you an compare them against
estimates and thus monitor performance against projected. Costs are based
on the hourly cost of the labour requred to do the work, costs of materials
that are consumed duriing a task or incorporated into the deliverable
produced by a task, and any fixed costs associated with a task or group of
tasks. They are always associated in time with the dates the work on the
task takes place, hitting the budget either at the instant work commences,
pro-rated over it, or at the end of the task. The costs tracked by Project
will probably never constitute 100% of the costs to the firm of the
project - there are many costs that should be tracked in accounting software
and combined with data from Project to get the final big picture.
When you define a task and assign resources to it, the cost of those
resources becomes the budget for the task and when saved for comparison,
that number becomes the baseline. 99.999% of the time you don't directly
input the baseline, instead you use Project's calculating abilitiy to come
up with an estimated cost of performing each task, the budget, and that gets
saved when you save the baseline so you have a reference point to later
compare progress against it. You cannot enter baseline costs or actuals
costs except those associated with tasks or summary tasks and the actual
costs accrue to your project on the dates the task takes place.
You said "Several tasks are software maintenance fees, consulting services
and travel expenses." Those are NOT tasks. A task is an observable
physical (or mental) activity performed by a resource and extending over a
specific observable period of time, without exception, and while their costs
may be associated with certain expense categories for accounting purposes,
the expense categories themselves are not tasks. Tasks represent specific
actions that must be performed to create the deliverable produced during the
project. Fees or expenses are not tasks - digging holes, welding girders,
writing programs are tasks and they have fees and expenses associated with
them. But the costs themselves do not exist except in the context of the
work they are being paid in order to get accomplished.
You said "expenses vary in rate and amount (thus) I cannot set a rate." But
if you're not setting a rate in advance, you're not creating an estimated
budget and Projects cost management tools essentially become moot. Those
tools are focused on tracking performance against plan and without the
advance estimates you don't even have a plan to compare against. Just
entering baselines manually is no substitute since that's not based on a
detailed quantitative analysis of the project requirements as defined by the
work to be done.
