How do you use actual monthly costs rather than % complete?

[E.D.]

I am using MS Project 2003 for home construction. I have dollar bid amounts
from subcontractors rather than man-hours. I want to use MS Project reports
to give draw requests to the bank to pay monthly subcontractors invoices as
well as track the remaining costs.
I'm stumped. I have tried to use fixed costs and actual costs and then
create a custom cash flow report using those fields. I am able to print an
"actual costs" cash flow report but I'm not able to keep track of remaining
expenses.
Any help would be appreciated.

 

[John]

E.D.
The built-in Reports feature, including custom reports, has limitations.
I played with it a bit but didn't find a ready solution. I would take
the following approach. Since Project has the nasty habit of "getting in
your pants" with respect to wanting to calculate cost fields even with
the option turned off, I would create two custom fields. The first I
would call 'actual cost' or better yet, 'actual payments' and the
second, 'remaining balance'. As payments are made to the subs by the
bank, manually enter the value into the 'actual payments' field. The
'remaining balance' field is set up to simply show the difference (i.e.
Fixed Cost - actual payments). Then create a view showing the custom
fields and use that as the "report".

Note that this scheme will not give timescaled values. However, if you
need the data as a function of time, I would use a VBA macro to transfer
the data to Excel where it can be formatted in any way needed.

If someone else has a better approach, I'm sure they will post it.

Hope this helps.
John