Amortizing material costs

[Bill Vallance]

I need to amortize the one-time and fixed costs associated with material
resources over the entire span of my project WITHOUT setting the timespan
for the associated tasks to the length of the project. An example - I need
to erect construction fencing at the start of the project. I want to show a
0 hours milestone task indicating that the fencing has been erected. But, I
want to amortize the rental cost for the fencing over 12 months. Is there a
way to amortize the cost without having a task length of 365 days?

Many Thanks,

Bill Vallance
Admirtalty Services

 

[Sean]

Bill:

In my opinion you're out of luck. If you want to waste a
lot of time wrestling with Project, I'm sure someone here
can point you to a way to do this.but it's not worth the
effort. For any type of financial modeling, I'd run the
data through Excel (and then back into project if you
wish).

Good luck!

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

Project is a WORK management tool, not a financial management tool. It
doesn't amortize costs at all, it simply tells you when you acrue them.
How, when, or even if they get paid for is none of its concern. Frankly,
the rental cost of your fencing is not really a task cost - it is instead a
fixed cost associated with the entire project. If you get down to strict
definitions, it is not a material resource at all - the fencing is neither
consumed nor incorporated into the deliverable. Bricks and mortar, OTOH,
would be a material resource since they actually become part of the
deliverable. Properly speaking, the fencing is a facilties cost, same as
rents on office space, desks for your engineers, or the pickup trucks out at
the job site. Project considers those overhead. If you want to include it
in the costs being tracked by Project, you can add it together with any
other similar costs, display the Project Summary Task (Tools, Options, View,
Project Summary), display the Cost Table and enter those global project
level costs in the fixed cost field of the top level project summary task.
Since there are often more than one line item, I'd create a budget worksheet
in Excel where they are detailed, maintained, and summed, then use an OLE
link to drop them into the cost field in Project.