This post will illustrate how to calculate costs in Microsoft Project. As you will see below, each tasks has a total cost and an actual cost. The actual cost are those costs that have actually been incurred during the execution of the project.
Costs in Microsoft Project and Standard Time® are very different. Each task in Microsoft Project may have an arbitrary dollar value. We’ll assign some below to demonstrate. This is not true of Standard Time®. Standard Time calculates task costs by multiplying hours times rates. (C = H * R) There are various rates a project may have, but the formula is always true. Microsoft Project is different. Follow the steps below to calculate costs in MSP.
Create some tasks:
- Add a task named “Task 1”
- Add a task named “Task 2”
- Set the Duration to 100h and 40h respectively
- Remove all columns by the Duration column (right-click and choose Hide Column)
The results look like this:
Insert the following columns:
- Cost
- Actual Work
- % Complete
- Actual Cost
The results will look like this:
Microsoft Project Cost Fields
Experiment with the Duration, Cost, and Actual Work fields, and you will see updates costs values. The image below illustrates this.
Updated Microsoft Project Cost Values
–ray