Days and Hours on same row?

[Cindy Mikeworth]

We are a consulting firm, and need to manage both the physical days the
project steps as a whole will take as well as our number of billable hours.

Is there a way to build a project estimate that can track both of these?

I've never used MS: Project before, so any guidance would be appreciated.

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi,

You may be lookoing for what Project calls Duration and Work.
HTH

 

[Jim Aksel]

Project has a whole shopping list for you and the units on each can be
defaulted from seconds up to years.

Routinely I use Duration, Baseline Duration, Work, Remaining Work, Baseline
Work, Cost, Baseline Cost, Remaining Cost. The money items all tie back to
the resource sheet and your billing rates.

Keeping track of billable hours may also require use of the Actual Cost, and
Actual Work columns. Be careful if your rates change mid stream..there is a
way to add new rates and effective dates for each resource.

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

You can use the generic Number fields to store and track billable hours but
I suggest you exercise caution in how far you go with that. Project is
first and foremost a work scheduling and cost estimating tool, NOT an
accounting application. Here's the problem - I have a task that's 5 days in
duration with one resource working full-time on it. The duration is 5 days
(40 hours) and the work is also 40 man-hours. If the resource earns $10 per
hour, the cost is $400. But how does that relate to billable hours?
Depending on your contract arrangements, etc, many different situations may
occur, varying even from task to task within the same project. Let's say it
was a fixed price contract - your billable amount might be $500. Your
resource finishes in half the time. Your cost is $200 but your billable is
$400. Or the resource takes half-again longer than expected - now your cost
may be $600 but the billable is still ... $500! OR consider the situation
of where you bill in whole day increments - resources works for 2 hours,
billable hours = 8 ... resource works for 8, billable hours = 8...or your
resources works 12, billable hours = 8 ... yet you only pay him for the
actual time he puts in. And there are many, many other scenarios that are
possible. My advice - use a real accounting package with a time and billing
module to track hours, payroll, client billings, etc and use Project for
what it does best - creating the task schedule and estimating and tracking
your internal direct costs of performing the work and purchasing the
materials required to complete your projects.