Protecting Salaries

[Doug Foster]

I'm new to using Project Professional 2003 for our company
but desire to track project costs but not have the hourly
rates available for other staff to view. Each of our
employees have different salaries so generic resources is
not an answer. Hiding the cost column etc does not
protect the info. What is an easy method of having
Project calculate costs but not display salaries when the
resource sheet is displayed?

Thank You
Doug

 

[Lucinda Brookens]

Hi Doug,

Microsoft Project calculates costs for resources based on
regular and overtime rates or on the per-use costs you
enter, or you can enter a one-time assignment cost. Most
novice users will not look for this information. So, you
can hide it from view it it's visible.

To enter cost per use for resources:
1 On the View menu, click Resource Sheet.
2 On the View menu, point to Table, and then click
Entry.
3 In the Resource Name field, select a resource or type
a new resource name.


Hope that helps,

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Jeremy,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

For individual resources, View/Resource Usage, click on the Work column,
Insert/Column and select Cost. Select the whole table by clicking the button
above the ID column heading (top left) and click the - minus button in the
formatting toolbar to Hide Subtasks.

Total costs can be seen from the Gantt Chart view, View/Table Cost.

FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information can be seen at
this web address: <http://www.mvps.org/project/>

Hope this helps - please let us know how you get on )

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP

I know I didn't start this post, but have a question related to salaries.

I have hourly rates plugged in for our two resources. How do I view a
summary of the project cost broken down into individual resources as well as
total project cost?

 

[Mike Glen]

You're welcome,

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP

That's perfect! Thanks Mike!

 

[Rob Schneider]

Recommend that you build up some sort of standard billing rate for
everyone ... get it by adding up all the salaries + benefit costs for
everyone and then divide by billable hours in a year. Use that rate for
everyone. Or divide into job categories if you need finer accuracy, but
one billing rate for all should be sufficient and overcome the huge risk
of exposing individual salaries.

Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.

rms

 

[Steve House]

There's really no way to hide the resource cost information from someone who
knows where to look. As I explain to students sometimes, if someone's not
high enough in the organization to see salary data, they're not high enough
to be allowed access to the project plan file in the first place and those
people should receive reports and views, perhaps as PDF files, that give
them the information that they have a need to know. An often used approach
for costing in general is to use a standard rate for the resource variously
called a "loaded cost" or "burdened labour cost" instead of actual salaries.
We may have 10 engineers whose salaries range from $50k to $90k in our
department but for staffing budget purposes we standardize on a rate of $70k
for each that includes salary, benefits, hiring costs, training costs,
pro-rata facilities costs (desk, utilities, computer, etc) and so forth.
These standard rates or salary ranges are often published openly anyway. A
side benefit of this approach is that the actual individual salary
information isn't used in the first place and so there's little
confidentiality to protect. We won't be able to see how much Joe costs us
to the penny versus Bill but for the project as a whole a little over here
balances a little under there and the result is close enough for planning
purposes. A projected cost that is +/- 10 or15% of actual is usually
considered bang-on.