Planning Costs
For planners who want to use their resource tracking system for capturing budgeted and actual costs, Open Plan provides a number of features for working with cost information.
You can perform the following tasks:
- You can define base and escalated costs for resources, resource pools, and skills.
- You can define the assignment using a profile spread curve. This allows you, for example, to enter budgets that are front- or back-loaded over the duration of the activity.
- You can enter actual costs for unbudgeted resources.
- You can have Open Plan generate actual costs from resource progress.
- You can report on high-level summaries of resource costs based on the hierarchy of a resource breakdown structure.
Open Plan also allows you to set up special-purpose cost resources that you can define and assign to activities just as you can define and assign standard resources. Because you can specify profile curves for cost assignments (just as you can for resource assignments, cost resources provide a great deal of flexibility for entering activity costs.