Hi,
I have very interesting question from on of my Blog readers:
“I have a problem with MS Project: I don’t know how to manage 2 type of cost for 1 person, I mean, I have 1 employee with 100USD cost per hour but I need to give him 200USD more each day of work for food. I can manage 100 USD/hour, but I don’t know how to manage 200USD/day in a new column or something?”
I will explain this problem in MS PROJECT 2016. First, as I always do, I will create a new Project with only one Task:
and I will create one Resource, John:
As you can see, I can put $100 per hour for John, and it means that each and every hour he will spend on a Task, it will be multiplied with $100. But, I can not add another cost for same Resource, for example $200/day, and to apply both of them to the same Tasks.
To make this possible, you can write a Macro, but if you are not familiar with that you can have another Resource with, for example John-food with $200/day. But, then you can’t see all costs for John.
With the custom field you will have no help. Because Custom field is for Task, or for Resource. And, if you create Custom field for Resources (for example: Food Cost), you will not be able to have total cost for the Task, because you have to create Task custom field which have to multiply duration of the Tasks with all Resources custom fields for all resource assigned, and this is not possible.
Where is the solution? There is no easy one. you should do manual calculation for each resource for each Task and assign it to the Fixed Cost. For example, if you know that Task will have 3 days duration, and John and Mary will work on it, and you wish to give them $200 /day, than in a Fixed Cost field you should put: $200 * 3 days * 2 (John + Mary) = $1200:
And, yes, this is not a very good solution, because you should track if Duration is changed (for example, from 3 to 5 days), and/or if you add or remove additional resource to the Task.
Final solution is to Calculate cost for food for resource per hour. For example it can be $25 /hour instead $200 per day. But, in that case, for example, John+s food cost is $200 if he will work 8 hours, but if he will work 10 hours it will be $250.
I know this wasn’t so much helpful, but it has to be clarified.
Regards
Nenad Trajkovski 