I think I would avoid entering it as a time-phased charge all together. A
charge has to be a charge for something, it doesn't exist in a vaccum and in
a project plan it is associated with specific tasks or groups of tasks. An
example that comes immediately to mind would be monthly rental on office
space that movie company has to rent while on location in a foreign city.
The bills come every month, but the reason for the rental in the first place
is the need to do the work of the group of tasks that create the requirment
for having an office to work in. If we didn't do those administrative
tasks, we wouldn't need an affice, and those costs would evaporate. The
costs should thus be charged to the project budget over the dates that the
work takes place on the tasks at hand, not the dates that the bills arrive
or the cheques are cut to pay them. This is, IMHO, a demonstration of the
fact that MSP is not a financial management application but rather a work
scheduling application. If you need to attribute charges in some other way
than "cost of work performed as it's being done" you need to hand that cash
flow management part of the job over to the accounting department and a real
accounting application.
