IntelliGantt Costing - A Full Four Featured Solution
Tracking costs is an integral part of just about any project. IntelliGantt supports four costing features to help you manage a range of projects from the most basic to reasonably complex. It's four costing features are:
- Wide Open
- Adding the Cost1 - Cost10 fields into overall task costs
- Adding resource costs into overall task costs
- Adding each tasks assignment Cost1 - Cost10 fields in to the tasks Cost1 - Cost10 fields
Let's look at these four features in action. By the way, these are checkboxes, so you can mix and match them to you needs. For example, you may want to move the assignment Cost1 - Cost10 fields in to their corresponding task Cost1 - Cost10 fields, but not automatically add them to the task's Cost field. Simple, just unclick the 'Add Cost1 - Cost10' checkbox.
To change the costing algorithms in IntelliGantt, choose the 'Costing...' menu under project.
The settings you make are specific to the project, but can also be set as defaults. When a new project is created, its costing settings are set according to the defaults. Marking your costing settings as default will not change projects you've already created.
By default, IntelliGantt starts with the simplest costing options-- Wide Open. This means you can put in a cost in any cost field. The only automatic costing feature at this point is summary rollups. That is, a cost entered in to a leaf task is summed in to its parent.
Moving on to the first feature, checking 'Add Cost1-Cost10' means IntelliGantt will disable the Cost field and instead sum the values from Cost1 - Cost10. This is useful if you want categorize your costs but still have an overall cost value. For example, you might rename Cost1 as 'Client Cost' and Cost2 as 'Admin Cost'. Then, if Add Cost1 - Cost10 is marked, the Task's Cost field will be the sum of 'Client Cost' and 'Admin Cost'. Note also that the genric Cost field in Task is now disabled. If you're ever wondering why you can't update the *$(@*#$%@@ Cost field, check your 'Costing...' settings.
Here we are making the Cost1 group visible. By checking these fields the Cost1, Estimated Cost1, Actual Cost1 and Cost1 Variance fields will be in our task grid.
If we put in a value of $100, we see the specific task has a value of $100 for Cost1, as does its parent, as does the project summary task.
Because the 'Add Cost1 - Cost10' feature is active, IntelliGantt sums Cost1 - Cost10 and puts the result in the Cost field. Since we only have a value in the Cost1 field, we see $100.
The next costing feature is 'Add Resource Cost'. This introduces us to the power of IntelliGantt assignments. When this feature is active, the resource costs of all assignments (that is, work * hourly rate) is summed and added to the task's Cost field.
In this example, Claire has been assigned to this task and, because her utilization is 100% and her hourly rate is $100, her resource cost is $1600 for this two day task. The task's Resource Cost field is therefore $1600. Notice the overall Cost, though, is $1700. Remember the $100 from Cost1? Because we also have 'Add Cost1 - Cost10' active, the costing effects accumulate.
The last costing feature is 'Add Assignment Cost1 - Cost10'. This turns off editing for the task's Cost1 - Cost10 fields. Instead, IntelliGantt sums all the assignment costs for Cost1 - Cost10 and 'promotes' the result to the corresponding task Cost1 - Cost10 fields. This option is effective when you want to detail how much each assigned resources cost is toward the task, and the overall project.
You'll want to right-click on the assignment grid's header bar and select the cost fields to display. Remember that the assignment Cost1 - Cost10 fields match the task Cost1 - Cost10 fields. In fact, if you renamed Cost1 to be 'Client Cost' in the task grid, you'll see it changed in the assignment grid as well.
When you update the assignments Cost1 value, you'll see it immediately go to the task's Cost1 field.
For this last example, remember that we have all three features active. So the resource cost is also being 'promoted' to the task, and the task's Cost field is the sum of Cost1 ($200) and the Resource Cost ($1600).
Note: when exporting to Microsoft Project, IntelliGantt temporarily turns off its costing model for the export and turns it back on when completed.