Assigning Cost Resources to Tasks
Cost resources do no work and have no effect on the
scheduling of a task. Cost resources might include categories of
expenses that you want to budget and track for accounting or financial
reporting purposes. Broadly speaking, the costs that tasks can incur
can include:
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Work resource costs, such as a person’s standard pay rate
times the amount of work they perform on the task.
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Cost resource costs, which are a fixed dollar amount that
you enter when assigning the cost resource to a task. The amount
is not affected by changes in duration or any other schedule
changes to the task, although you can edit the amount at any time.
You can also see cumulative costs resulting from assigning the
same cost resource to multiple tasks.
For the new book launch project plan, you’d like to enter
planned travel costs for certain tasks. Since work has not yet started
on this project at this time, these costs represent planned costs
(indeed, you should consider all costs that Project has calculated so
far in the schedule to be planned costs, such as those resulting from
work resource assignments to tasks). Later, you can enter actual costs
if you wish to compare them with the budget.
In this exercise, you assign a work resource and a cost
resource to a task and check the plan’s overall duration and cost
values.
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Click the name of task 17, Author reading and
signing at book fair.
This task requires air travel by the author, and you’ve
allocated $800 in anticipation of this expense.
Currently task 17 has no assigned resource and no cost.
First, you’ll assign the author to the task.
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In the Resource Name
column in the Assign Resources
dialog box, click Toni Poe, and then click
Assign.
Project assigns Toni Poe, a work resource, to the task. As
you can see in the Cost field of the Assign Resources dialog box,
this assignment has no cost. That’s because this work resource,
Toni Poe, has no cost rate or per-use cost. So even though the
assignment generated work, there’s no cost associated with it.
Next, you’ll assign the cost resource.
-
In the Assign Resources
dialog box, select the Cost
field for the Travel cost
resource, type 800, and then
click Assign.
Project assigns the cost resource to the task.
-
To see both assigned resources, scroll up the Resource list in the Assign Resources dialog box.
You can see the cost incurred by this assignment in
the Cost column of the Assign Resources dialog box. The travel
cost value will remain the same regardless of any changes made to
the scheduling of the task, such as work resources being assigned
or unassigned, or the task’s duration changing.
Note the task has the same duration of one day and Toni Poe
has the same units and work values as before. Assigning the cost
resource affected only the cost incurred by this task.
To conclude this exercise, you’ll revisit the project’s
overall duration and cost values now that you’ve made some
resource assignments.
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On the Project tab, in
the Properties group, click
Project Information, and then
click Statistics.
Note the shorter duration of 36 days (it had been 41 days)
and the $19,740 cost. The shorter duration is the result of
applying effort-driven scheduling to some tasks. The cost is the
sum of work resource assignments plus the one cost resource
assignment.
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Click Close.
Clean Up
Close the Simple Assignments file.
