Valid Activity Unit and Cost Values

This topic describes acceptable unit and cost values that can be entered on activities and assignments.

When updating your activities and resource or role assignments, you typically will enter values for the work being performed in terms of time units such as hours, days, weeks, months, and years. Cost values on activities and assignments will be in terms of base currency or project currency, depending on your project currency setup and view settings. In most situations, the values you enter will be positive, but there are times you may find it easier to update units or costs using negative values. This may be done by users entering negative values in order to make adjustments to other unit or cost fields.

Negative unit and cost values can be entered as long as other related data remains valid. In Primavera Cloud, negative duration values are not permitted on activities or assignments. Duration is one variable in the following equation, used to calculate an assignment's duration and unit values:

Units = Units/Time x Duration

This equation applies to an assignment's corresponding Planned and Remaining fields. When one value in the equation is modified, the other two may be recalculated. The recalculated value is controlled by the activity's duration type, which enables you to determine if the duration, resource availability, or budget (units or costs) is the most important factor in your activity. See Assign a Duration Type to an Activity for more information. In the equation above, entering a negative value for Units or Units/Time may cause Duration to become negative, which is not permitted in the application. To allow a negative Unit or Units/Time value, the Duration must be fixed so that it cannot become negative. This is possible using a duration type with a fixed duration. Because Actual fields are not part of the duration type equation, they can be entered as negative or positive using any duration type.

As described in Entering Activity and Assignment Units and Costs, unit or cost values entered at the activity level are distributed to assignments with the same resource type as the activity field. This may be Labor or Nonlabor for unit fields, and Labor, Nonlabor, or Material for cost fields. Unit and cost values entered at the assignment level roll up to corresponding fields at the activity level. The following rules describe entering positive and negative values in activity-level unit and cost fields. If a value is valid in an activity-level field, it is also valid at the corresponding assignment-level field. There are different rules depending on the activity's duration type, the resource type of the field you are editing, and the number of resources or roles assigned to the activity.

For Fixed Units or Fixed Units/Time duration type activities:

• If there are no assignments with the same type as the activity field you are editing, you can enter positive or negative actual units or actual costs in the field. You can also enter positive planned or remaining costs or units, but not negative.
• If there is one assignment with the same type as the activity field you are editing, you can enter positive or negative actual units in the field. You can also enter positive planned or remaining units, but not negative. Values entered at the activity level will be shown in the corresponding assignment field. Costs must be entered at the assignment level.
• If there are multiple assignments with the same type as the activity field you are editing, you can enter positive or negative actual units if the actual unit values of the corresponding assignments are all positive or all negative. You can also enter positive planned or remaining units, but not negative. Values of zero are also supported. Entered values will be distributed across the corresponding assignment fields.

For Fixed Duration & Units or Fixed Duration & Units/Time duration type activities:

• If there are no assignments with the same type as the activity field you are editing, you can enter positive or negative units or costs of any field type (Planned, Actual, Remaining, or At Completion).
• If there is one assignment with the same type as the activity field you are editing, you can enter positive or negative units of any field type. Values entered at the activity level will be shown in the corresponding assignment field. Costs must be entered at the assignment level.
• If there are multiple assignments with the same type as the activity field you are editing, you can enter positive or negative units of any field type if the unit values of the corresponding assignments are all positive or all negative. Values of zero are also supported. Entered values will be distributed across the corresponding assignment fields.

If you attempt to enter a negative value in one of the scenarios above where it is not permitted, an error message will appear and the value will not be entered. You may also receive an error if changing the duration type of an activity causes any values to violate one or more of the rules above.