Project Cost, Task Cost

[dyonisos]

Hello everybody,
A cost code can be joined to a task. So I put to a task a cost code but I never saw where I can find the project cost. I saw a project budget but no project cost. The cost code is implemented on the interface but no value-added like project cost, task cost are implemented. Am I blind ? Is it a feature request ?

Thanks.
Sorry for my bad english.

Edit : I found this link
http://www.dotproject.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=318&page=2&pp=10&highlight=cost
But no news about it for few months.

[caseydk]

Go to the System admin and fill in the billing table. That will let you relate costs codes to actual billing rates.

[dyonisos]

Casey, I know that we can put code cost with billing table and after relate them to tasks logs. But I need the project cost, task cost not only task log cost. I want it to do a sum of the tasks logs to calculate the total cost of the task and after do the same thing to the project. Perhaps, I didn't see the feature. I expect I understood what you say. I'm not sure. English isn't my born language.

[wrw3]

Dyonisos -- did you find thie following post in your research?:

http://dotproject.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=6068&postcount=10

It appears that Cyberhorse has a solution in play that may work for you.

Cheers,

Walt

[caseydk]

I'm trying to think of ways of approaching this. Since task logs can be editted at any time (by the proper permissioned people), you'd almost need to calculate this consumed budget on the fly whenever you were showing the project detail...


Thoughts?

[wrw3]

Keith:

I have four initial thoughts that I'm pondering. Cost tracking begs a couple of design issues.

1) dotProject's value would be greatly enhanced if it could track project costs - this is a worthy consideration.
2) One interested in cost tracking would be interested in capturing costs for non-human resources as well as labor hours. The Other Resrouces module allows dotProject to account for dependencies. Not sure if I can identify a log entry as applying to one of the non-human resources though. Further, for non-human resources, the cost model is potentially more complex, as you may be interested in fixed as well as variable costs.
3) The option to edit or delete log entries with attached cost consumption bothers me somewhat. Consumption declared should not be casually eliminated (even if you're not concerned by Sarbanes-Oxley kinds of control issues). Maybe a project worker has two weeks to edit their log entries, after which they get locked down by the system.
4) It also occurs to me that dotProject customers who are interested in cost tracking might also want to discriminate between expense and capital consumption, a la GAAP SOP 98-1. That capability might not be in an initial release of cost tracking capability, but should be in the requirements set the dotProject team would work from. On the other hand, a cost record attached to a log entry might simply have a check-box as to Capital vs Expense -- and we can rely on the log author to know the difference.

A thought about the performance and load implications: Cost_to_Date would always need to be calculated on the way to the browser. I would guess that most of the time, the project worker is not interested in the cost figure. To keep from burning CPU cycles needlessly, the cost information might be displayed in summary form on the project detail page upon request (check-box), and for the best breakdown and display, via a project report.

(OK, that was 5 thoughts. :D )

Cheers,

Walt