Microsoft® Office Project 2007 All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies®

Chapter 2. Understanding Costs

<feature><title>In This Chapter</title>

✓	Understanding how costs accrue
✓	Establishing Work resource rates
✓	Specifying unit costs
✓	Adding fixed costs
✓	Allowing for overtime
✓	Estimating resource availability

</feature>

These days, not much in life is free — and if you use Project to track costs, there’s no such thing as a free resource. That’s because Project uses resources assigned to tasks as a way of calculating most of the costs accruing to your project.

When you create a resource, you specify a Work resource rate (by default, this rate is tallied up per hour) or a per-use cost for a Material resource. You can also create Cost resources; that is, a set cost that you can apply to a task that isn’t calculated using a per-use or hourly rate. An example of a Cost resource is a fee for your trade show booth.

Other factors can come into play in determining your project costs, such as how many hours a day a resource is available to work and overtime rates. As you tally your bottom line, all these settings come together to put you over or under budget.

In this chapter, you explore the relationship between resources and costs. You find out how to set resource standard and overtime rates, create fixed costs, and set the availability of resources on individual tasks in your project.

Accruing Costs All Over the Place

Project helps you to account for costs on your various tasks with a combination of costs per hour, costs per unit, and fixed costs. Before you begin to assign ...