Enter Activity Costs

Activity costs enable project managers and other stakeholders to track the cost of a schedule as it progresses. Cost tracking is critical for billing and budgeting purposes to ensure that individual activities and the project as a whole are accurately cost loaded and meeting all cost requirements.

Depending on your organization's preferences, you may only be entering costs directly on the activity, or you may be entering costs for individual resource and role assignments. Where assignments exist, activity field values are distributed among its assignments of the same type (Labor, Nonlabor, Material) as the activity field. All assignment values roll up to the corresponding activity fields.

The cost of your activities is determined by multiplying work units by the rate price of each work unit. The Calculate Costs from Units setting controls the link between corresponding unit and cost fields. When enabled, costs and units are linked. When disabled, costs and unit values can be edited independent of each other. This setting can be set for each resource and role assignment. For a detailed explanation of unit and cost fields and the rules for entering values on these fields, see Understanding Activity Units and Costs.

To enter activity costs:

1. Navigate to the Activities page
   1. In the object selector, select ﱆ Project or  Program, and then select a project or a program from the list.
   2. From the  Main Menu, select  Schedule, and then select Activities.
2. On the Layout menu, select  Activity Details, and then select an activity in the table.
3. To enter costs at the activity level, do either of the following:
   • In the table, enter cost, unit, or duration values in the appropriate fields. To add columns to the view, select the  Open Column Selector icon in the column header or the  Settings icon in the page toolbar.
   • Select the Status detail window. In the header of the Units or Costs column, select the unit or cost type that you want to edit. To edit actual values, the activity must be In Progress or Completed. To edit duration values, update the values in the Duration column of the detail window.

     Note: You must have a Default Price/Unit value greater than 0 configured before you can enter costs on an activity with no resource or role assignments. This value is set at the project level.

4. To enter costs at the assignment level, do the following:
   1. Select the Resource Assignments detail window, and then select a resource or role assignment.
   2. Enable or disable the Calculate Costs from Units setting, and then modify cost, unit, duration, or units/time values.
   3. If you want to modify an assignment's Price/Unit value, ensure Rate Source is set to Override.
5. All changes made to this page are saved automatically.

Tips

• Editing unit or cost values may cause other cost values to automatically recalculate. If you change an assignment's Rate Source or Rate Type, or enable its Calculate Cost from Units setting, you will be prompted to recalculate all costs based on the given units. For more information on recalculating costs, see Recalculate Costs Overview.