More than five cost rates per resource / 2007 version

[Thor Hovden]

My client uses their resources on several projects and we are hitting the
limit of 5 cost rates per resource.

I found a russian firm that has programmed a solution,
http://www.bogdanov-associates.com/eng.asp?rubr_id=493 but it requires the
2003 edition and is not applicable for the installation at hand that use MS
PS 2007.

I have searched the net, newsgroups and other documentation but noone seems
to have this specific problem, which kind of makes me think if the use of MS
PS is useful or if it is 'wrong' somehow.

Thus two questions crystallizes:

1) Is MS PS usable in scenarios where you have multiple (more than 5) cost
rates per resource?

2) How can we tweak MS PS to be able to input more resource rates and use
these in our reports?


Regards,
Thor Hovden

 

[Gary L. Chefetz]

Thor:

I think the problem you're running into is that you want Project to be a
"billing" solution and it is barely as costing solution. The 5-rate limit
isn't so bad when you're working with costs, but it's rather limiting when
you want to calculate billing. For this, you are better served by
calculating this outside of Project and Project Server using the time data
you collect in Project Server.

--
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Gary L. Chefetz, MVP
MSProjectExperts
Project Server Consulting: http://www.msprojectexperts.com
Project Server Training: http://www.projectservertraining.com
Project Server FAQS: http://www.projectserverexperts.com
Project Server Help Blog: http://www.projectserverhelp.com

 

[Thor Hovden]

Thank you sir,

Isn't it typical; As times goes by we tweak and tweak on systems written for
one purpose to use it also for something else. This is indeed of economic
reasons, just a little more work on top of a solution instead of a huge
investment to add a little more value, but has the bad effects that one day
we sit and use a not so smooth solution.

My starting point here is that we seek to improve our current billing
solution based on MS PS to include more cost rates. A guideline is that my
client do not want more external systems, so it should preferrably be
integrated within MS Project / MS PS.

If I put a .net programmer on this job, what direction should he take, in
general?

Can he use custom fields to encapsulate the needed data or is he better off
using something else?

 

[Ben Howard]

Excel is a wonderful tool for this, and so is SSRS. It would be relatively
easy to take the work data out of the reporting database, and multiply it up
by a billing value per resource, to produce an input to invoices (or even
invoices!) note that your process here will have to be robust so that the
data does not change after the fact. This is one reason for using timesheets.

 

[Gary L. Chefetz]

Thor:

If I were going to put a programmer on this job, I'd first be certain that
the programmer has experiene using the Project Server PSI and web services,
and is well versed in SharePoint and SQL Server. Anyone with these
qualifications should be able to tackle the job without too much trouble.

--
----------
Gary L. Chefetz, MVP
MSProjectExperts
Project Server Consulting: http://www.msprojectexperts.com
Project Server Training: http://www.projectservertraining.com
Project Server FAQS: http://www.projectserverexperts.com
Project Server Help Blog: http://www.projectserverhelp.com