Microsoft Project

Hi Dean

Thank you for your question. The Budget cost field is used when creating Budget resources. It allows you to set a top down budget for your project rather than building a figure from the tasks up.

It's the kind of thing you would do before a baseline is set and will answer the question am I within acceptable parameters before I submit the plan?

Start with just one category of item to budget - e.g. expenses. You can add more later.

Create a Cost resource called "Expenses". Cost resources don't have a starting figure. We set the Cost when the resource is assigned to a task.

Next make the budget category resource. This will capture the combined budget for expenses from all the tasks it is assigned to.

If you include the word "budget" in your resource name it will be easier to distinguish from the other resources. Perhaps it could be called "- budget - expenses". Beginning the name with a hyphen also moves it first in alphabetical lists.

Set its type to Cost, double click the resource and in Task Information tick the budget checkbox.

Next we will do something that we would normally never do. Assign your budget resource to the project summary task. The value of this comes when we look at reporting.

We are nearly there, just a couple more steps to go.

Use some kind of label so that it is easy to tell which budget category they are part of. You could use the code or group fields but to keep them available for their intended use you could just use one of the custom fields such as text1


Insert the text1 field and set the entry for this field for the budget and Expenses resources you created to read "expenses"

Now to set your top line budget figures:

Go to Task Usage view. Because your budget resource is assigned to the project summary it will appear at the top of the table. At last we can add the Budget Cost field to the table.

In the Budget Cost column, alongside the "- budget - expenses" enter the budget figure for this item.

switch back to the resource sheet. Here add the Budget cost
add Cost fields.

Finally group by Text1
This will group your resources into Budget groups, with a top figure (the budget figure you just set) and below them you will be able to see the cost for resources of that category in your project. You will then be able to see if you have assigned more or less than your budget which makes a great report.


With regards to Actual Costs - these are set to be calculated by Project automatically when you record progress (assuming your resources have a cost rate set). Project will still let you type an Actual cost without progress being recorded. The way it manages this is to add your cost to the Fixed cost field (which automatically shows up in Actual cost anyway).

Sometimes you want to record a figure higher than Project has calculated for you. If you enter a bigger number than the calculated Actual cost into the cell Project just splits the amount so that anything over its figure is moved to the Fixed cost column.

Well I hope this helps Dean - I realise it's a rather long answer. Let me know if you have any further questions.


Kind regards,
Andrew