Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Comparing Costs to Your Budget

Suppose your project plan has budget targets for different cost categories: $90,000 for labor costs, $2,500 for travel expenses, and $500 for permits. Using Project’s budget resource feature, you can define your budget for different cost categories. You can then group resources to compare your budgeted costs with your planned costs. That way, you can view your travel budget of $2,500 side by side with your planned costs of, say, $3,700, and immediately see that your next goal is to find a way to trim those travel costs. The box on Assigning Accounting Codes describes another method for tracking project costs based on your organization’s accounting system.

Budget resources are great for comparing budgeted costs against the planned costs for cost resources. Budgeted costs for work and material resources, however, are a different story. For labor and equipment costs (work resources), you can enter only budgeted work amounts, not costs. So instead of a labor budget of $10,000, you have to enter an overall work amount like 200 hours. Knowing what amount of work to enter can be tricky when different work resources have different cost rates. Similarly, for material resources, you have to extrapolate a budgeted work amount based on the quantity of materials you need. The box on Comparing Budgeted Labor Costs provides a workaround for this situation.

This section describes how to set up budget resources that you can compare with your planned costs and work. It’s ...