How do you account for asset costs in Project?

[MTerry]

Project seems to do a fine job of tracking people costs but how does it
account for assets required for a project (non-consumables), i.e., process
equipment (to be depreciated)?

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

You could pro-rate the asset cost (what you're describing is also called a
facility cost, btw) on a per-task basis and enter in the fixed cost field of
the task or phase summary task it's attributed to. But essentially Project
doesn't track those things, not does it comfortably track revenues or
billings. You've hit right on the head why I tend to sound like a broken
record saying "Project is not an accounting application." It's very good at
tracking the sub-set of the total financial picture that it is designed to
track. But that data from the Project files should be just one of a number
of INPUTS into the real project accounting system of your choice and MSP
should not be expected to provide total project financial reporting all by
itself.

 

[meterry]

Steve:
Thanks for your advice and insight. As you can tell, I'm new to Project.
Do you have a reccomendation for accounting for these asset / facility
costs? I could actually do most of the Project functions on Excel which
would of course do the asset accounting, too.

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

I'm not an accountant so I couldn't offer much advice on packages you might
try. But if you're able to do it in Excel, why change? If it ain't broke,
don't fix it <grin>.