Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Updating Project Costs

Projects can have up to five different sources of costs: human resources, equipment, materials, cost resources, and fixed costs for tasks. Each type of cost that applies to your project needs actual cost information before you can see how the project’s cost compares to its baseline cost. In this section, you’ll learn how to update each of these five cost sources. Project’s Cost table is a great starting point, with fields for baseline, scheduled, actual, and remaining costs. You can apply this table to a usage view to see costs for individual assignments as well.

You can also insert cost-related fields like Actual Cost into any table. Just remember that, if you add these fields to a task-oriented table, their values represent task costs; if you add these fields to a resource-oriented table, their values relate to resources instead. And when you add these fields to a usage view, you can see values for the individual assignments.

Updating Actual Costs for Work Resources

If you set up resources with standard rates, overtime rates, and costs per use (Checking for Cost Errors) and assign the resources to tasks, then Project calculates actual cost as soon as you enter actual work. That means you never have to update actual labor and equipment costs yourself. The box below tells you what you have to do if you want to update resource costs manually.

With equipment resources, the challenge is making sure that actual work time is reported. To solve that problem, designate ...