Deltek Open Plan Help

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Calculating Costs

Open Plan calculates costs and stores them at the detail level, allowing you to store time-phased quantity, cost, and escalated cost by resource and activity.

All activity costs represent a roll up of these detailed costs. Because open Plan stores both costs and quantities, the resource rates that are in effect when the progress is calculated are locked in.

Once you have assigned resources to your activities, you can have Open Plan roll up these costs to the activity level. To calculate budget costs for activities, click Cost Calculations on the Processes tab to display the Cost Calculations dialog box.

Attention: For more information on how detail costs are calculated, see "Cost Calculations" in the Deltek Open Plan Developer’s Guide.

Group Process Cost Calculations

You can also perform cost calculations in Batch Mode. This allows you to run cost calculations for multiple projects at one time. To run cost calculations in Batch Mode, select more than one project from the Details pane of the Open Plan Explorer, and click Cost Calculations on the Preferences tab. The Cost Calculations [Batch Mode] dialog box displays. Set your options, and click OK.

If a project is closed, Open Plan will open it in Exclusive mode, perform the process, save the changes, and then close the project. If a project cannot be opened in Exclusive mode (because another user has it open in Exclusive or Shared mode), it will be skipped. If you have a project open when the batch process is run, a cost calculation will be performed on the project, but the changes will not be saved and the project will remain open. You must manually save the changes yourself.

Note: Cost calculations for multiple projects can also be run by selecting a group of projects and clicking Cost Calculations on the Processes tab. Open Plan creates one cost calculation session log, listing the project results in the order in which the projects were processed in the batch.

Budget Cost

By default, Open Plan normally calculates budget values by rolling up the (escalated/unescalated) cost from a baseline. If a PMB exists, Cost Calculations will use this baseline. If no PMB exists, Open Plan calculates budgets using the currently selected baseline or the first selected baseline if multiple baselines are selected.

Note: By always using the same baseline (regardless of which baseline is selected) for calculating budgets, Open Plan provides consistency and reliability.

If no baseline (PMB or otherwise) exists, Open Plan will calculate budgets from resources directly assigned to activities as versions prior to 3.x did. You can set this as the default project behavior by selecting the Use Version 2 Cost Calculation Method option on the Cost tab of the Project Properties dialog box.

Creating and Using a Baseline

After your project is well-planned and the schedule and resource loading is the way you want it, you will want to create a performance measurement baseline (PMB). Creating a PMB ensures that all future budget and earned value calculations will be based on these values.

Attention: For more information about the PMB, see Project Baselines.

Related Topic

Related Procedure