Setting Saturday and Sunday as Overtime

[Redwood]

Hi everyone,

I need to set Saturday and Sunday as overtime, i want it to automatically
pickup that
a particular resource is working over time and calculate the hours and
costing.

Another Q : Saturdays Overtime is at say $525/h and Sundays is $600 how do i
have both overtime costs?

Thanks in advance

 

[John]

Hi everyone,

I need to set Saturday and Sunday as overtime, i want it to automatically
pickup that
a particular resource is working over time and calculate the hours and
costing.

Another Q : Saturdays Overtime is at say $525/h and Sundays is $600 how do i
have both overtime costs?

Thanks in advance

Redwood,
When you say "...set Saturday and Sunday as overtime...", do you mean
that the overtime work is actually scheduled or do you simply mean that
the resource MAY work on weekends and therefore needs to be paid
overtime?

I'll assume that weekend work is NOT scheduled (i.e planned ahead of
time). If there is a single valued overtime rate, it's pretty
straightforward. On the Resource Sheet, enter the overtime rate for each
resource. Then on the Resource or Task Usage views, display Actual
Overtime Work in the timescaled fields on the right. As the work is
performed and you enter a value into the % Work Complete field, Project
will populate the Actual Work field with the scheduled hours. You can
see this on the Resource or Task Usage view. However, for weekend work,
you need to enter a value in the Actual Overtime field on the assignment
rows of the Resource Usage view. Costs will be calculated appropriately.

Having different overtime rates for Saturdays and Sundays presents a
more complex scenario. Although Project does have the ability to
escalate rates over time, doing so for just one day per week will be
neither convenient nor easy. If I had to do it, I would probably use a
VBA macro to distinguish the Sunday actual overtime hours from the
Saturday actual overtime hours and then either dump the total cost into
a spare field or possibly tweak the data in the normal Cost field. Short
of a custom VBA macro, you could use the "analyze timescaled data in
Excel" utility and then apply the appropriate rates to the weekend days
in Excel.

Hope this helps.
John
Project MVP

 

[Steve House]

John suggested some ideas. Adding my 2 cents. You can't really 'set' Sat
and Sun as overtime. The calendar defines the regular time working hours.
By definition, any work performed outside those hours is overtime work. But
Project doesn't ever automatically schedule work during those OT hours - if
you just enter a task with a duration of 10 days and assign a resource to
it, the work will ONLY be scheduled to occur during regular working hours
and any hours the calendar would consider OT hours are skipped over. While
the task bar will extend over any non-working days, if you look at the usage
view you'll see the scheduled hours for those days are blank. For OT to be
scheduled, you need to manually assign the exact OT hours on a case by case
basis (and when you do, Project still doesn't schedule them on non-working
days - it only adds the OT work as a prorated average to the work that is
scheduled in regular hours after deducting the OT hours scheduled from the
duration calculation and it assumes the resource will decide just when he'll
do those hours - Project simply doesn't care about when, only how much.

There is only 1 OT rate tracked per resource. If you have several rates,
perhaps you could use an average of the two as the value entered in the
resource's information. But usually that's not really necessary - remember
the costs is Project are *estimates* and are never exact anyway. It's not
an accounting, payroll, or time and billing program and should never be used
as a substitute for a real timecard system. Yes, for Joe's paycheque it's
vital to know he did A hours at X rate and B hours at Y rate during the
payperiod but Project isn't designed to give you that sort of detail and
precision and you really shouldn't try to get it to. For Project budgeting
it's close enough to say "this task is projected for X hours at Y dollars"
and let it go at that - the reality will never be exactly that when you do
the work anyway. For that matter, it's generally a bad practice to schedule
overtime into the basic project baseline schedule at all - save your OT
reserves as a hold-card to get you out of trouble should the project run
into delays and build your baseline project on the assumption that all work
is to be performed during regular working hours and at regular rates of pay.