Well, you don't have to use a separate calculator to do it on a task by task
basis - you can record the billing rate in a spare field and use Project's
own user-defined calculation ability to do this and it'll work in some
cases. But you are correct in that accounting for billing rates is more the
province of a separate, purpose-built, accounting application and not the
project costing portion of Project. Project's cost calculations are aimed
at estimating your own internal, direct, marginal cost in getting the
specific work on the project done. Billing rates may take that as one input
but there are many other inputs such as overheads, cost of capital, profit,
etc that also need to be taken into account that Project has no knowledge
of. And consider too that Project uses man-hours of work as a base for its
calculations - if you have a situation such as the client being charged a
certain fixed amount per day regardless of the amount of time the resource
puts in that day or time with a certain minimum (not an unsual situation)
Project has no way of calculating that - Example, Your John Q whom you pay
$65 but bill the client at $90 per hour, this time has a half-day minimum
billing. On one particular day he works 2 hours on the client site and
another day he works 5 hours. YOUR cost for doing that work for the first
day is 2 man-hours of work * $65 = $130, and for the second is 5 man-hours *
$65 = $325, simple arithmetic. But you client's cost isn't that simple - on
the first day they're billed not for the 2 hours the work takes but for 4,
the minimum billing amount, and the charge is 4 hours * $90 = $360. OTOH,
the day he's there for 5 hours their cost is a straightforward 5 * $90 =
$450. In the first instance, his billing amount is not directly based on
the number of hours spent until he exceeds 4 hours whereupon in the second
instance it IS based on actual time spent. But in both cases, your cost is
directly based on the actual hours required for the work while the amount
you bill the client really has no simple relationship to the amount of work
performed. Project would have no way of tracking and calculating that sort
of thing other than by a direct task-by-task manual entry of billing amounts
or hours to be used for billing separate from the hours the work is actually
requiring.
--
Steve House [Project MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit
http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm for the FAQs
Kate Carrillo said:
Mike,
I am struggling with a similar problem as Jason's (I think), and I am
guessing that there's no real solution in the current version of Project.
I
would like to track both the costs for the company of a resource and the
billing rate of the resource. In other words, what that resource costs the
company, and what that resource costs the client (which is particularly
important for fixed-price projects). for example if we pay John Q. $65.00
per
hour, and mark that up to the client for $90.00 an hour.
But it seem seems like all I can do is decide whether or not I want to use
cost rate per hour or billing rate per hour in the standard rate column,
and
then simply record the other rate with the resource and figure out
separately
with a calculator what the actual $$$ is based on hours worked. Is that a
correct assumption?
