Hi,

I have a question about Cost Resources and Actual value in MS PROJECT 2013:

“Dear Nenad,

I defined a cost resource “Hotel” and a work resource “Thomas” with hourly rate of 50 USD. For both of these resources I selected the accrue at “Start”. I defined a task of 1 day duration and assigned Thomas to it. I also assigned 200 USD of Cost Resource “Hotel” to this task. Then I saved the baseline with baseline cost of 600 Dollars. When I make the task 50% complete, the Actual Cost only shows the Cost of work resource. Even when the task is 100% complete, the actual cost only reflects the cost of work resource. The behavior remains same even if the accrual method is changed to “Prorated” or “End”.

Can you suggest a work around?”

I wrote about this issue long time ago. From Microsoft point of View this is not a bug! From mine, it is. But, guess what. There is a workaround.

OK, let me make the same Scenario as my Reader has. I will make a Task so called Trip:

Now, I am going to make Thomas, and Hotel as resources.

I’m going to assign those Resources to the Task:

Now I am going to save the Baseline:

I will show you the Cost Table:

Now I’m going to tell MS PROJECT that Task is, for example 50% finished:

You can see that Actual Cost is $400!. Why? Because Tomas has Accrue at = Start, and that means that when the Task is completed even 0,1% MS PROJECT calculates 1 day = 8 hours = 8 hours * $50 = $400.

Why MS PROJECT does not calculate that for Cost Resource? Because it does not! So what do you have to do. You can use Resource Usage, or Task Usage View. I will, for this example, use Task Usage View:

And Now Back to the Cost Table:

Everything looks fine now. Boring? Yes it is I know.

The interesting thing is that if you assign only Cost resource to the Task, everything works fine. Tri it!

Regards!