Project 2010 For Dummies®

Chapter 8

What’s All This Gonna Cost?

In This Chapter

Understanding how costs accrue

Establishing work resource rates

Specifying unit costs

Adding fixed costs

Allowing for overtime

Estimating resource availability

Working with budget resources

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 your project.

When you set up a resource, you specify a work resource rate (by default, this rate is tallied up per hour) or a material resource per use cost. You can also create cost resources, that is, a variable cost that isn’t calculated using a per-use or hourly rate but may be used several times in a project, such as travel expenses.

Some other factors come into play as well, such as how many hours a day a resource is available to work and any overtime rates. At the end of the day, all these settings come together to put you over — or under — budget.

In this chapter, you explore the relationship between resources and costs and also 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.

Mary, Mary, How Do Your Costs Accrue?

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