Plan Settings Dialog Box

Use the Plan Settings dialog box to specify the budget type, the cost and billing rates, and other settings to use for the currently selected project plan.

When you create a new project from an existing project and elect to copy the existing project's plan, the plan settings for the existing project are also copied for the new plan. If you create a new project in any other way, the new project is assigned default plan settings based on options selected on the Plan Settings form (Settings > Resource Planning > Plan Settings) and the Rates form (Settings > Resource Planning > Rates). In either case, if you have the required access rights, you can change those settings for the new plan.

When You Save the Plan Settings

When you click Save in the dialog box, any changes you made on any of the tabs are saved. In addition, Vantagepoint does the following:
  • Recalculates the planned cost and/or billing values for all employee and generic resource assignments based on the current rate settings.
  • Recalculates the planned bill amount for all reimbursable consultants based on the current rate settings.
  • Recalculates the planned bill amount for all reimbursable expenses based on the current rate settings.
  • Recalculates the planned bill amount for all units based on the current unit billing multiplier.

Because all assignment amounts are recalculated using current rate settings when you save settings, you should use rate tables and effective dates for new rates if you want older rates to continue to apply for certain calendar periods and new rates to apply for subsequent periods. For example, if you add a new rate with an effective date for an employee, only assigned hours for that employee that fall on or after that date are affected by the new rate.

If you change settings for a plan and then decide that you are not happy with the changes, you can revert the current plan back to the last published version. If you have not published since making the settings changes, that effectively reverses those changes and restores the prior plan values.

Plans Converted from iAccess

If a plan was converted from iAccess to Vantagepoint, many converted assignments may have override rate information that was saved for specific calendar periods while in iAccess. Following conversion, those plan amounts, by default, are not automatically recalculated when you save plan settings in Vantagepoint. If you want all planned amounts in a converted plan to be recalculated automatically, select each of the Recalculate check boxes on the Labor, Expenses, and Consultants tabs, and then save the plan settings. You only need to do this once; from that point forward the planned amounts will be recalculated automatically each time you save the settings.

[In 5.0 pub, replace above paragraph with this.] If a plan was converted from iAccess to Vantagepoint, many converted assignments may have override rate information that was saved for specific calendar periods while in iAccess. Following conversion, those plan amounts, by default, are not automatically recalculated when you save plan settings in Vantagepoint. If you want all planned amounts in a converted plan to be recalculated automatically, select each of the Recalculate check boxes on the Labor, Expenses, Consultants, and Units tabs, and then save the plan settings. You only need to do this once; from that point forward the planned amounts will be recalculated automatically each time you save the settings.

Whether or not you force a recalculation as described above, any new assignments added to a converted plan in Vantagepoint and any plan data entered for new calendar periods for existing assignments will be automatically recalculated based on current settings each time you save. In addition, if you edit any of the converted calendar period values that have saved rates from iAccess, they will, from that point on, be subject to automatic recalculation as well.