Microsoft Project For Dummies

Chapter 10

Determining a Project’s Cost

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding how costs accrue

Establishing work resource rates

Specifying unit costs

Adding fixed costs

Allowing for overtime

Adding up all the costs

There’s no such thing as a free lunch — and if you use Project to track costs, there’s no such thing as a free resource, because Project uses resources working on tasks as a way of calculating most of the costs of the project.

When you set up a resource, you specify a work resource rate (by default, this rate is calculated by the hour) or a material resource per use cost. You can also create cost resources — a variable cost that isn’t calculated using a per-use or hourly rate but that may be used several times in a project, such as travel expenses. For example, if you assign a resource to work ten hours on a task and give that resource an hourly rate of $50, you’ve added a $500 ...