New Baseline Incorrectly Adds Up Summary Costs

[CigarsandWine]

Hello all, I'm hoping someone might be able to help me with problem I'm having.

In work we use Microsoft Project 2003 (behind the times I know) for a programme of about 300+ projects.

Today was time to rebaseline the entire programme, and although all the dates seemed to baseline fine, the summary costs are not adding up correctly.

Within a specific project, the actual cost figure and the baseline cost figure that are allocated against a particular phase of the project may be the same, but for some reason they do not roll up to the summary the same, with the summary baseline figure being either less or more than the actual summary cost figure. This problem is not happening with every project, just a few here and there, but it's still a pain, especially when we're trying to track costs over the course of the year.

Anyone any idea what maybe wrong with it?

Any help anyone may be able to give would be greatly appreciated.

Regards


Gary.

 

[PDQBach]

> P2003 ... a bit behind the time

Piffle. Lots of companies skip releases. (The company where I'm working has done exactly that so we're in the same software boat, so to speak.)

> Your cost problem.

The companies where I have worked have almost always tracked project costs in a spreadsheet or external program/system. There are a variety of reasons for it but it boils down to tracking project costs in a system that is integrated internally with other software systems (so the incurred costs can be charged back to the business department or client). Writing an interface to extract the data from an MSProject file is, uh, challenging (for lots of reasons) and so the use of an already existing costing/billing program tends to give them substantial flexibility in writing off costs, incorporating capital purchases, etc., while linking to Suppliers, Accounts Payable, Payroll/HR ... you get the idea.

That's not helpful to your problem, though.

First off, I may be misreading what you typed, but Baseline Cost and Actual Cost aren't really the same thing. Baseline Cost is the *total* *estimated* cost for the task when it was baselined (at its simplest: Resource Rate * Work ... ignoring, for the moment, the complexities that come in when dealing with overtime rates, etc.)

Actual Cost is the cost accrued to date so if the task is partially complete then the Actual Cost will be less than the Baseline Cost.

You have to be careful about the "Actual Cost" field, too, since it can be manually entered or calculated. I would have expected the baseline process to simply copy the value across but perhaps it outsmarts itself and actually calculates it.

I didn't have the time to play around with manually entered Actual Costs.

Another thought that went through my mind was to check to see if MSPrj is failing to correctly handle Fixed Costs (particularly since fixed costs are affected by the Fixed Cost Accrual flag).