Costing Rate Tables: A-E

[Mark Etheridge]

Hello,

I am trying to figure out how the costing tables work, and how I can handle
multiple projects all with different billing rates.

I have been reading that I should setup (which is good to report variance):
Table A: with my costing rates
Table B: with my billing rates

What I can't understand, is how do we setup / revise the billing rates per
project? BTW, we have a common resource pool setup with our multiple
projects (up to 30 sharer files) linked to the resource pool. I initially
tried to set a resource rate to $50 within the resource pool (saved it),
then opened up one of my projects linked to the pool, and revised the rate
for that particular project (then saved it). Doing this overwritten the rate
within the pool, which automatically changes the rate in all other projects,
making the costs incorrect. Am I missing something?

For example, I would like to setup project billing rates such as the
following (all linked to a common resource pool):
project1 (Developer rate): 50$
project2 (Developer rate): 55$
project3 (Developer rate): 59$
project4 (Developer rate): 60$
project5 (Developer rate): 100$
project6 (Developer rate): 80$
project7 (Developer rate): 90$
project8 (Developer rate): 95$
project9 (Developer rate): 85$
etc....

Thanks for your assistance!

Mark

 

[Steve House]

I'm not a big fan of using Project as a tool for billing in the first place.
Those rate fields are primarily there to help estimate a bottom-up budget
for the project. Multiple rate tables allow you to have different rates for
different tasks. For example, I do both training and consulting and charge
different day rates for each activity. I might put my consulting rate in
table A and my training rate in table B. When I'm assigned to a task, we
could then use the usage view to indicate which rate table is to be used to
calculate the cost of the hours of work on this specific task. You can pick
either rate table to use for the tasks's cost estimate but you can only pick
one. Even custom fields don't help because you can't directly access the
rates from the different tables - once you state in the assignment details
which table to draw the rate from, that becomes the only rate used.