Sub Projects and budgeting

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    • #388505
      Wayne
      Guest

      All,

      I am managing a large multi year project with many different site locations and crews. We get individual PO’s for each site and each one takes approximately 6-8 days to complete. I would like to be able to use the individual site PO for my budget and then track all cost against it with a sum up report after each completes. Right now I have a master project with each site being a summary task with its components and costing under each summary. That works great except for the budget piece. Assigning an overall project budget wouldn’t work for me as I need to track how each site has done. This seems like such an obvious need that I hope I am missing something simple. Are sub projects the answer or is there some other way I should be setting this up?

      thanks for the help,

      Wayne

    • #388512
      Larry Christofaro
      Participant

      Wayne, you are correct that Budget resources are at the project level. For task level tracking I would use baselines. Enter the cost, baseline it, and then track at the task level.

      With that said, you might want to step back and ask yourself if MS Project is the best tool for doing what you are trying to do with project costs. Project does pretty well at tracking costs, but it’s heart is still about tracking tasks and deliverables. I’m only saying this because of your need in a multi-year, multi-location scenario. It might be a lot to add to an already complex project is all. You might want to consider complimenting MS Project with a bit of Excel for some of the heavier cost tracking. That of course always depends on your requirements. If you need the timephased tracking and rollup at the project level and in one location then that’s another story.

    • #388520
      Wayne
      Guest

      Thanks Larry I will look into baselines. Honestly, I think you might be right about the right tool for the job. I was (and am) using Excel and for my purpose it does work pretty well. Essentially I don’t have too many milestones to track on each site and most everything is based on sequential tasks. Just a lot of small jobs needing to track adherence to scope and any change orders required.

      I just really like some of the sorting and reporting options Project has. It gives a really nice visual overview. The resource utilization is really nice too.

      Wayne

    • #388524
      Larry Christofaro
      Participant

      Glad it’s making you think. I’ve also done the blocking and tackling in Excel and then update summary results in Project for rollup. You can also use a separate cost resource for each site PO that might make it easier to roll it up all in Project. See, always options. Good luck…

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