Cost Calculations Dialog Box
Use the Cost Calculations dialog box controls the way Open Plan performs cost calculations.
Cost calculations in Open Plan is the process of calculating resource hours and costs at the activity, resource, subproject, and project level. This feature is also used for calculating earned value.
In order to ensure that baseline cost values are correct, it is important that you calculate costs using this command before you create or save a baseline.
When calculating costs, Open Plan aggregates the resource costs for each activity (including subprojects) and for the project as a whole. These project costs are reflected on the Cost tab of the Project Properties dialog box.
Unless you specify otherwise, resource costs are automatically rolled up to the activities and subprojects to which the resources are assigned. You can, however, prevent selected resources from having their costs rolled up by setting the Roll Cost flag to False for those resources. This feature allows you to maintain alternative pricing information for activities without duplicating costs.
The Cost Calculations command also rolls up budgeted, actual, and remaining labor units to the activity and subproject levels.
In the calculation, Open Plan rolls up physical percent complete. This is accomplished by rolling up the earned value to the parent level, dividing the total by the parent budget value, and then multiplying by 100.
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 the Cost Calculations button. The Cost Calculations [Batch Mode] dialog box will be displayed. 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, cost calculations 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.
Open Plan creates one cost calculations session log, listing the project results in the order in which the projects were processed in the batch.