Hi,

I have interesting question from one of my Blog readers:
”I am working with Engineering services provider. I have created my resource pool sheet. I have assigned my resources (Employees/Engineers) on different projects. These engineers use different tools (licenses etc.) to complete the task.
We have to pay for those licenses quarterly. I cannot buy these licenses for one month.
I would like to know how to assign the license cost with resource (Employees/Engineers). Sometime my employees have 2 months workload but I have to pay the license cost for three months. Please guide me how can I use MS project for this?”

I will use MS PROJECT 2016 for this example. I will first create simple Projects with two Tasks:

As you can see Task 1 has 1 month, and Task 2 two months Duration.

Now I am going to create Resources:

As you can see License is Material cost. I will assign John and License to the Task 1:

and I will get:

You can see the result in the Cost table:

As you can see Total cost is $ 16.300 (John will work 8 hours per day * 100 $ * 20 days e.g. 1 month = $ 16.000 + License $ 300 = $16.300).

Now back to the Problem. How can you assign License to the Task if you for example have to buy License for three months and your Task is shorter? And how to get right Cost.

There are three ways:

1. You can put price for three months (in my example $ 300) for the License and then assign one license per Task as I did. If you have same license which you will have to pay for 1 month, 2 months etc., then you will have more than one Resource (for example: 1 Month License, 2 Months License etc.)
2. You can put price per month for License (for example $ 100), and then assign 3 Licenses per Task if you have to pay for three months. this is little bit confusing because even when you have right costs, someone could think that you need 3 Licenses, which you do not
3. Use fixed Cost like I will do in Task 2, and then write in Notes what are those cost for:

Hope this helps.

Regards!