Goal: Define and share cost information - Project

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Goal: Define and share cost information

Applies to
Microsoft Office Project 2003 Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 Microsoft Project 2000 and 2002

After you enter cost rates, you can save them as your budget (budget: The estimated cost of a project that you establish in Project with your baseline plan.) before you start tracking and managing the plan. Also, you may want to attach important notes about budget decisions, share the budget information with others, or transfer information to other file formats.

Tip This article is part of a series of articles that describe a broad set of project management activities. We call these activities "goals" because they are organized around the project management life cycle: Build a plan, track and manage a project, and close a project. The project life cycle is outlined in The Project Map, where you can find a link to an article about each project management goal. Most of the articles include links to supporting information or procedures that you perform in Project or Project Server. These "goal" articles were designed to help you not only use Project but also better understand project management.

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See all goals on the Project Map

number 1 Add notes about cost information Before you save your cost estimates as your budget with a baseline plan (baseline plan: The original project plans [up to 11 per project] used to track progress on a project. The baseline plan is a snapshot of your schedule at the time that you save the baseline and includes information about tasks, resources, and assignments.), you can attach cost-related information to tasks (task: An activity that has a beginning and an end. Project plans are made up of tasks.), resources (resources: The people, equipment, and material that are used to complete tasks in a project.), or the entire project.

Add a note to tasks, resources, or assignments

Number 2 Save baseline cost information When your cost estimates are in line with your goal for costs, you can establish them as your budget with a baseline plan. In this way, you can compare actual costs (actual cost: The cost that has actually been incurred to date for a task, resource, or assignment. For example, if the only resource assigned to a task gets paid $20 per hour and has worked for two hours, the actual cost to date for the task is $40.) with your original plan as the project progresses.

Save cost information with a baseline plan

Number 3 Print or publish cost totals After you establish a budget, you can share your budget (budget: The estimated cost of a project that you establish in Project with your baseline plan.) information with team members or other stakeholders (stakeholders: Individuals and organizations that are actively involved in the project or whose interests may be affected by the project.).

Click all of the following that apply:

Print cost information to display the resource (resources: The people, equipment, and material that are used to complete tasks in a project.), task, or project cost totals (summarized or distributed over a task's duration) in a view (view: The combination of one or more views [Gantt Chart, Resource Sheet, and so on] and if applicable, a table and a filter. Use views to work with information in a variety of formats. There are three types of views: Charts or graphs, Sheets, and Forms.), chart (chart: A view or part of a view that represents project information graphically. For example, the Gantt Chart view consists of a sheet and a chart pane where tasks are represented as horizontal bars.), or report (report: A format in which you can print schedule information that is appropriate for the intended recipients. You can use the predefined reports provided by Project or create custom reports.).
Publish project information on Project Server if your team uses Microsoft Office Project Web Access 2003 (Project Web Access: The Web-based user interface that is used to access information in Project Server.) to communicate. You can post the most current information, including costs, on Project Server for others to see. Because project managers aren't necessarily administrators, you may need to ask your server administrator (administrator: Sets up and manages user accounts, assigns permissions, and helps users with network or server access issues. This person can also manage and customize various elements in Project Professional and in Project Server.) to do this for you.
Save your project information as a Web page when you want to include cost information from a Project schedule (schedule: The timing and sequence of tasks within a project. A schedule consists mainly of tasks, task dependencies, durations, constraints, and time-oriented project information.) in an HTML document or save the information as a Web page. You can export (exporting: Transferring data from Project to another program, such as Excel. When you export data, you choose or create a map that specifies the relationship between the fields in Project and the columns in the ouptut file.) data from the project plan to HTML (HTML: An acronym for Hypertext Markup Language, which is a formatting convention for presenting text and graphics on the World Wide Web.) format.

Number 4 Export cost information to other programs If your company uses other programs to keep track of costs, you can transfer budget information from Project to them.

Export Project data to another file format

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