Help System

Using the Help Search
Using the Help Search
  • Phrase:Returns all topics that contain the exact phrase in the search criteria. Use quotation marks around the phrase.
    Ex."system administration"
  • And:Returns all topics that contain all the words in the search criteria, in any combination. Insert a plus sign between all words in the search criteria.
    Ex.system + administration
  • Or:Returns all topics with any combination of words in the search criteria. This is the default.
    Ex.system administration
For more information:Searching Online Help

Plan Resource Information

Planning the development of your resources is crucial to ensure that you are using them effectively and efficiently.

Planning the development of your resources allows you to:

  • Establish the list of resource names
  • Determine the similar calculations/results
  • Create rate sets
  • Create budget elements

It is important to define resources so that they can express any type of cost you intend to track in Cobra. However, since results use both disk space and processing resources, it is also important that the names of results be conserved as much as possible. As a rule of thumb, it is usually advantageous to use as few result names as possible to maintain a compact project database.

Cobra allows for a limited number of results in a single project. However, most project costs can be expressed using only a few result names.

For example, the result Direct should be used as the calculated direct labor cost on all resources. In addition, it will be used as the base for material items that will use a direct input for costs.

While this might cause the field names to be inappropriate in some cases, you can differentiate between different types of costs by using the Result field in the budget calculation. The result prompt is what appears on the data entry screens.

You must consider your reporting requirements when creating the result names. Since reporting by hours is a valuable tool, you do not want to use the generic Quantity result for hours.

Results are often used to identify different currencies for a project. Examples of results are USD, GBP and EUR. If your projects contain hundreds of currencies, you should consider using generic result names such as Direct for the home currency and Controlling, and Company for other currencies used for multi-project reporting.