Microsoft® Office Project 2007 All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies®

Chapter 4. Tallying Costs

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✓	Reviewing what affects costs
✓	Determining how Project calculates costs
✓	Viewing cost data
✓	Customizing cost fields
✓	Creating a project summary task

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After you’ve created and assigned some resources to your project, you begin to see your costs mount up at the summary task level. Understanding what affects those costs, how Project calculates those costs, and what cost information Project makes available helps you to understand what constitutes your Project budget.

In this chapter, we provide a good grounding in the hows and whys of costs and your Project plan.

How Your Settings Affect Your Budget

In Chapters 2 and 3 of this minibook, you explore costs and assigning resources to tasks. To help round out this discussion of costs, you should review all the factors that drive costs. In addition to a resource cost per hour and a resource base calendar and availability, you assign resources to tasks at certain percentages. Project uses all these factors to calculate the cost of a resource assigned to a task. (See the next section to understand how those calculations work.)

Here’s the real beauty of entering information in Project: After you make settings for your resources, Project does the work of tallying and showing total costs to you in views, such as the Cost Table of Gantt Chart view shown in Figure 4-1.

Figure 4-1. Total ...