Cost vs Billing

[Ran'zel]

Hello,

Currently I'm using project to track my resources, time estimates, and
some invoicing projections. I wanted to expand it to track the cost of
a project against what we billed for the project, to track the
gain/loss. Some of the things I want to include are

Hardware purchase price
Hardware resale price
Employee Hourly cost to my company
Employee Hourly billable rate to the customer
Fixed price cost of a task.

I would then like to correlate this into a report to perhaps show
monthly or quarterly the financial status of a project, as well as the
work load status.

Is this even possible with Project? If it is, does anyone have
recomendataions on some tutorials or books I can get my hands on to
bring myself up to speed?

Mike

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi Ran'zel

With Project's standard functions this is utterly impossible, I'm sorry :-((

 

[John]

Hello,

Currently I'm using project to track my resources, time estimates, and
some invoicing projections. I wanted to expand it to track the cost of
a project against what we billed for the project, to track the
gain/loss. Some of the things I want to include are

Hardware purchase price
Hardware resale price
Employee Hourly cost to my company
Employee Hourly billable rate to the customer
Fixed price cost of a task.

I would then like to correlate this into a report to perhaps show
monthly or quarterly the financial status of a project, as well as the
work load status.

Is this even possible with Project? If it is, does anyone have
recomendataions on some tutorials or books I can get my hands on to
bring myself up to speed?

Mike

Mike,
Is it possible? Well yes and no. Understand that Project is not a
financial application, it is a planning and scheduling application with
the ability to track basic costs of a plan. Project also has classical
earned value metrics but it doesn't appear that's of any interest to you.

For the "yes" part of the answer, Project does have spare fields that
can be used to hold auxiliary data or customized to include formulas.
Project also has VBA which can pretty much expand the capability to
anything you need, but of course that requires a good working knowledge
of VBA.

For the "no" part of the answer, Project does not have all the built-in
fields or functions for the type of financial tracking you want to do.
It does have resource cost and fixed cost information but not the other
data. It's just not set up that way.

I doubt there are any tutorials or books on this subject because the
capability is not native to Project. Whether there are any adjunct
applications that work with Project to bring this capability in, I don't
know but again, I doubt it because I think most people who are doing
full financial tracking are using applications specifically designed for
that.

The bottom line is, sure, it can be done. Some of the fields you mention
are already available but the others would have to be created either
through customized fields or VBA.

Many others will have additional thoughts.
John
Project MVP

 

[Ran'zel]

That was kind of my gut feeling, that this was not what project was
meant to be doing. Which was why i wanted to do a sanity check before
spending time and money reading a 1k page book, to find out that I
couldn't do it.

We can go the route of doing some VB development to bolt on some of the
features and/or dump it into excel for analysis, but I don't know if we
want to go down that road yet.

Does anyone know of compatible programs that could use some of the
information from project to do the correlation? I have heard about
Microsoft Dynamics, but I don't know anything about it.

 

[John]

That was kind of my gut feeling, that this was not what project was
meant to be doing. Which was why i wanted to do a sanity check before
spending time and money reading a 1k page book, to find out that I
couldn't do it.

We can go the route of doing some VB development to bolt on some of the
features and/or dump it into excel for analysis, but I don't know if we
want to go down that road yet.

Does anyone know of compatible programs that could use some of the
information from project to do the correlation? I have heard about
Microsoft Dynamics, but I don't know anything about it.

Ran'zel,
Personally I would probably go with VBA that exports to Excel, but then
that's my fote'.

I don't know anything about MS Dynamics, maybe someone else has some
info or I guess you could try the MS homepage, that should have some
info.

John

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

Aren't all of these things provided in mainstream accounting systems?