Classes and Cost Sets

User-defined classes and cost sets let you set up multiple budgets for a project, track actual costs using different criteria, and maintain information about commitments, funding, change orders, and so on, over the life of the project.

Types of Classes

Four types of cost records are created in Cobra: budgets, earned value, actuals, and forecasts. For each of these types, other than earned value, you can define different cost classes that track specific types of information. For example, you can distinguish between different funding sources when budgeting, or distinguish between accounting, invoiced, or incurred actual costs.

You can define different characteristics for each type of class. For example, you can assign different fiscal calendars to budget classes for spreading. This allows you to spread budgets for planning using fiscal years instead of months. Classes used for budget costs can refer to different rate files to indicate, for example, change orders that involve different labor costs than those originally planned. This allows you to segregate change orders from original proposal values and ensures that rate changes are applied only when appropriate. Forecast classes can indicate which other classes they are based on, allowing, for example, the generation of different sets of forecasts depending on the selected class (or classes) of budget costs.

Cost Sets

At a higher level of cost classification are cost sets such as Budget, Earned Value, Actual Cost, and Forecast. These cost sets allow you to group related classes together for reporting, and can include user-defined reporting sets for special purposes. Since the labels of these cost sets are user-defined, it is possible to produce reports that use the cost terminology that is most familiar to the intended audience.

It is also possible to create custom cost sets. For example, you may have a budget cost class to enter provisional funding that would not be included when reporting.