How to best handle contractors

J

James Hart

I'm interested as to how people handle contractor billing in Project Server.

Currently (not Project Server), we estimate an external resource cost based
on what we know about tasks. When contractor invoices arrive, they are
billed to the project and taken from that "external resource" bucket.

I see 2 options with Project Server
1) Define each contractor in Project Server and calculate an actual hourly
rate, track tasks as normal and then match this cost against invoices when
they arrive. this requires contracts to have access to Project Server to log
time.
2) Bill contractors at $0.00 p/h (either local resources or a generic
resource) and only enter in the invoiced cost when it comes in fortnightly.
This would mirror our current approach.

I'd like the approach which means the least overhead for the PM, but also
doesn't skew budget data. I'm also concerned about paying for lots of CAL's
for contractors to have access to log time.

Any suggestions?
 
R

RickD

I prefer to capture actual costs against a plan and the tasks assigned to
contractors using actual rates. You don't have to have the contractor sign on
to PWA; you can create a surrogate Project Server account for each
contractor, request a non-MPS timesheet from the contractors and have someone
on staff enter the timesheet data into PWA by logging on to the surrogate
user id. The major issue with contractors and plans, especially if they are
on time and material, is that most prefer a start date and end date for a
project or set of deliverables and they assume 100% utilization. A project
plan does not necessarily reflect 100% because of peaks and valleys in
assignments. If you require 100% reconcilliation to an invoice you are better
off selecting your second option; entering in costs when an invoice is
presented.
 
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