Classes and cost sets provide the mechanisms for allowing you to enter a change request and still be able to produce reports showing only the approved budget and forecasts.
There are four types of cost records:
Budget (BCWS) — These are entered through the planning process
Earned value (BCWP) — These are the result of earned value calculations
Actuals (ACWP) — These are entered when actual costs are updated
Forecast (EAC) — These are either generated by the forecasting facilities or entered manually
For each of these types (other than earned value), you can define different cost classes to track specific types of information. You can, for example, distinguish between different funding sources when budgeting, or distinguish between accounting, invoiced, or incurred actual costs. For example, a change request can be entered into a newly created class to distinguish it from the approved budget.
Each type of class allows you to define different characteristics, depending on its context. For example, budget and forecast classes allow you to specify the set of rates to be used for calculating the derived costs. Budget classes indicate if the costs are to be tracked by the Project Audit Log (or Program Log).
When entering a budget change request, the costs are stored in an unapproved budget class so the Project Audit Log is unaffected. When the change is approved, the budget is reclassed into an approved budget class automatically. It is at this time (during the change request approval) the Project Audit Log is updated, and you can see the change in a IPMR CPR Format 3 or a Change Management report in Cobra.
When you create a change request that indicates Include Change Details on Form, a new class is created when the change request is created. This class is named the system generated Change Number, for example, BCR00001.
Classes are grouped together into Cost Sets such as BCWS, BCWP, ACWP, and EAC for reporting purposes. For example, the EAC cost set is comprised of the Forecast (ETC) class and the Actual class. In addition to the standard cost sets, you can create your own cost sets for reporting purposes.
When you create a change request that indicates Change Details on Form, a new cost set (that contains only the new class) is created when the change request is created. This cost set uses the system generated Change Number as its name, for example, BCR00001. To run a report that shows the existing budget and the unapproved budget, you can select from one of the many Cost Analysis reports that allow you to select Cost Sets. For example, the Earned Value Curve or the Time Phased Report.
If you want to produce a report that shows the approved budget and all unapproved budgets (created by many different change requests) you could select many cost sets or create a new cost set that contains classes for all unapproved cost sets.
Since the correct rates are defined by the class, most people keep a number of approved budget classes that represent the budget changes that were approved by fiscal year. Each of the classes would indicate the rate file containing the rates for the specific year. When you have many different approved budget classes, they are all included in the BCWS cost set for reporting of budget.