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I have rarely seen Expenses used as Budgeted Costs, most of the time to get a cost curve I would Resources. Here's what Oracle's help says about Expenses:
Expenses are nonresource costs associated with a project and assigned to a project's activities. They are typically one-time expenditures for nonreusable items. Examples of expenses include materials, facilities, travel, overhead, and training.
You can categorize expenses, indicate a unit of measure for expenses, and specify whether an expense accrues at the start or end of an activity or uniformly over its duration. Each expense has a budgeted or planned cost, actual cost, and estimated remaining cost.
Expenses are not the same as resources. Resources generally extend across multiple activities and/or multiple projects. Examples of resources are personnel and equipment. Unlike resources, expenses are project-specific. The Project Management module does not include expenses when leveling resources. Resource curves are not supported for expenses.
That being said, I checked and the Activity Usage Profile does allow you to graph Expenses. To get there click on the Activity Usage Profile button (green horizontal bar in front of three gray vertical bars) at the top of your screen. This will display the "Profile" in the bottom right. Right click on in the window and select Activity Usage Profile Options. From there, under the Data tab, choose "Cost" and check "Expenses". Your project graph should appear.
Hope this helps.
Thanks - the 'Activity Usage Profile' button did exactly what I wanted.
To me 'expenses' seemed the right place to manual add the revenue we are expecting from each activity. But, I am new to Primavera, so I appreciate any suggestions.
Eventually for each activity I would like to have;
- Revenue (possibly multiple revenue items for each activity) - manually inputted
- Estimated cost (possibly multiple revenue items for each activity) - manually inputted
- Actual cost (possibly multiple revenue items for each activity) - manually inputted
Then I'd like plot all 3 on a graph based on the schedule for the activities.
Is this possible in Primavera? How would you suggest that I do this (use Resources?)?
Thanks for any suggestions.
I should point out I live in the construction world and don't use P6 for the revenue side.
Definitely possible in P6 but I would need to know more about your contract/needs to make a recommendation. This is where P6 gets tricky.
If all your calculations for cost and revenue are done outside of P6 (say in Excel or your estimating program and manually entered into P6) then you are fine using what ever works best for you. From your previous post this sounds like what you want. You can easily get the graph to show costs over time using Expenses. Unfortunately you can only display Labor, Nonlabor, Materials and Expenses on the P6 "Profile".
If instead you want your graph to change automatically with delays/price changes/schedule mods then you will need to look at using resources.
Feel free to email me (its in my profile) if you need further help.