Newbie at Project Cost Question

[jim2herb]

First major construction project. Renovating ALF for health care company.
Using vendors for entire project. Procurement Management. However I want to
learn project. Most of the resource cost issues are not valid for me I do
not think.
I was trying to set up a simple budget. Getting quotes from vendors. I
thought I could put this in the baseline cost colum. However they do not add
up automatically for me in sub sections and also as a total. Why??
I had to copy and paste all those prilimary numbers to the total cost
section to get sums.
Last question. What should I do for just vendor only quotes? I want a
proposed budget. Put in when the vendors get paid and how much. And then a
final total cost with variances from my budget.
Thanks for your help.
Jim

 

[Jim Aksel]

Try starting this way. Go to the resource sheet (View/Resource Sheet) and
create a Material resource with a cost per use of $1.00. You can then create
tasks that use this resource. For example you could say "Purcase Electrical
Wire" and add 45,000 units of "Purchased Material" This will create a
$45,000 cost item for you since "Purchased Material" has a unit cost of 1.00.
That's a lot of wire, for sure.

If you use a more generic resouce, such as Material, it can be used for
copper pipe, electrical wire, roof material. Also, you can have another one:
"Subcontracted Labor" and apply the same rules.

The baseline cost items get into a different area. Oriniarily, your
material and human resource items will total into a cost column (not baseline
cost). In order for Baseline Cost to have real values, you need to save a
baseline for your project. This is under Tools/Tracking/Save Baseline... It
is very dangerous to enter values into any column titled Baseline since
Project is designed to take care of that for you.

Using a baseline (it is for both cost and dates) allows you to track
progress in schedule and cost against your original promises. I like to say,
it is how we hold you to the original lies you promised.