How do I make a report to show planned monthly expenditures?

[HZR2003]

Need to generate a report to show what monthly "planned" expenditures will be ranging from the 15th of one month to the 14th of the next month.

The problem is that when a task's duration is "split" by the filtered date, the cost appears twice. It seems project does not divide cost over the duration of a task and apply it to the filtered date.

Example: If a task takes 5 days to complete and has a total cost of 5000, I would expect a report to show 2000 for cost if I filtered the report to end on the 2nd day of the task's duration. Instead I get $5000.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!

 

[PDQBach]

It seems you're using one of the pre-packaged reports. Which one, specifically? (When I know that, I'll be able to play around and confirm a couple of things before I give you an answer.)

 

[HZR2003]

Project is in Tracking Gant View. Under Reports, I select Costs, Cashflow and select Edit to apply a filter. Filter is "DateRange...

 

[PDQBach]

It is as I guessed (assuming I understand your problem, of course!).

When you set up the report on the Definition tab, you chose an interval of "Months".

When you entered your start and end dates, you chose dates that are in the middle of the months.

Behind the scenes, Project adjusted the start date you chose to the first day (first work day?) of that month and adjusted the end date you chose to the last day (last working day?) of that month.

If you chose Jan 15 to Feb 15 then Project adjusted that to Jan 1 to Feb 28 and prepared the report using those dates.

You can demonstrate this by running a report for Jan 1 through Dec 31 and then repeating the report for Jan 12 through Jan 14. The figures for January in both reports will be the same.

The reason for this is the underlying TimeScaleData object makes the overrides (as I hazily recall from some stuff I did a long time ago) and, it appears, the reports function uses this object.

Workarounds: nothing particularly palatable. Set the interval to "weeks" (but remember you will get a full week even if you choose a middle of the week start or end date) and then do your own spreadsheet sums (and good luck with that since there isn't an easy way to move stuff from a report into a spreadsheet).

I'm fairly certain you'll see exactly the same thing if you use the Analysis toolbar and select "Analyse TimeScaleData".