Budget as Resource

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    • #383298
      VeeJoo
      Guest

      Hi, I’m a newbie to MSProject. I want to make a work program which incorporates our budget per activity. We have these so called Internal Order numbers which serve as the budget or cost centers, usually assigned per activity or spend type (OPEX or CAPEX). In our department, we have a bunch of projects and thus lots of IO numbers as well.

      Is it possible that I make these IO’s as cost resources but not on a Cost per Use sense? Instead, since these are budget costs, these should be monitored not to be exceeded. I want to assign these (in the Project view) to their corresponding projects (to summary tasks, since they have detailed activities below it). What if these IO’s could be used in various projects at once? How do I know a specific IO is already exhausted or overspent?

      For example:
      Project A uses IO#1
      Project B also uses IO#1
      IO#1 is only 10 Million
      Project A was estimated at 6M and Project B at 4M
      Project A was awarded at 7M and Project B at 4M (Obviously my IO budget is short by 1M due to the higher award of Project A).

      How do I go about that scenario in MSProject?

    • #383301
      Larry Christofaro
      Participant

      VeeJoo, what you are asking is certainly possible with Microsoft Project. My concern is that this is getting into some detailed level functionality that I’m not sure you want to get into as a newbie. In general, you can create what is called a Resource Plan and that to assign all your resources. It is basically a project schedule that only contains resources. You would then reference that plan in each of your projects. It sounds simple and isn’t difficult but has some caveats you will need to take into consideration. If all you are looking for is budgeted and awarded cost numbers, another simpler solution might be to use Excel. I hate saying that in a Project forum but just trying to do the best for your situation. Do some searching on resource plans and you can probably find some good articles or videos on the topic. Good luck…

    • #384626
      Sai Prasad
      Participant

      VeeJo – I agree with Larry that resource plan should help you to share resources across project files. To address the second part of your question about budget cost to be tracked and assigned to the respective project, you can create these budget costs resources as budget resources in the resource pool file. Refer to Budget Cost (task field) in this article https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Budget-Cost-fields-debac6b2-48fb-4314-b1a5-8a5f0979f6cb

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