Hi,

I’ve got a question from one of my Blog readers:

“Mr. Nenad, I have a question please:
Let’s suppose that I have a human work resource assigned to different tasks within the project. It receive each month a fixed salary of 4000 dollars even if it has free days (without task assigned) during the month. How can I do that in MS Project ? If I create a work resource with a standard rate of 4000$/Month then I will not be able to solve the problem since MS Project will reduce this monthly salary to an hourly rate and the cost of the resource will be proportional to time consumed, which is not the case I speak about. I want for each month (January, February, ….December) a fixed salary for this resource.”

Well, the answer is: “It is NOT possible with MS PROJECT!”. Why? There are several reasons. The major one is that if you put a resource to the Task like this one:

then what is the real cost of the Resource who has $4000 salary per month. As you can see the Resource will work from 18.09.2018 to 30.09.2018, and from 01.10.2018 to 22.10.2018. Now those are two months but not full months. And rarely will you have task which started at the first day of the month, and finish at the last day of the month.

Another example is like this:

Now let’s say that resource will work 30% on the Task 1, and 50% on Task 2. What will be the cost on Task 1, and what on Task 2? Tasks have two different durations. And even worse, the resource will work only 80% of his time. What about rest of the 20%?

So no, this doesn’t make a sense. You should always have a rate per hour, week, month, and YES MS PROJECT should calculate costs according to effort (hours) which resource will spend on those tasks.

Regards.