How to Assign a Fixed Cost to a Task in Microsoft Project 2016

Microsoft Project contains a cost column to display the total costs of a variety of tasks in your project. This contains the sum of all task costs, including the cost of work resources, the amount that you may people for certain tasks, the costs of materials that are being used, and even any fixed costs associated with the project. You may also choose to display fixed costs in a separate column.

Fixed Costs

The way that you would start to enter a fixed cost is with the Cost Table. Start by switching from the Entry Table to the Cost Table.

View > Tables > Cost

By default, the Cost Table contains a Fixed Cost column, a Fixed Cost Accrual column, Total Cost, Baseline Cost, Variance, Actual, and Remaining. Today, we are just going to focus on the first few.

In our example, we will enter a cost of Connecting Services. For now, you can set the Fixed Cost Accrual to Start – we will examine this more in the next section.

Note that when you sign a fixed cost to a task, you are still able to assign other costs. Let’s say that part of the team will spend a couple of hours Connecting to Services. In this case, we will want to add this to the cost of the task.

Multiple Fixed Costs

In some instances, there might be more than one fixed cost associated with a task. Unfortunately Project 2016 will only assign one fixed cost to a single task. Generally the best thing to do is to add the costs together and to leave a note explaining the separate charges.

Simply add a note by selecting the task and bringing up the Task Information > Notes. Here you can leave an explanation of the various fixed costs.

Other Special Cases

Fixed costs come in a lot of variations. Let’s say that we have an outside consultant helping us with a specific task, in addition to the fixed costs that we have already outlined. This consultant doesn’t charge on an hourly basis, but rather a fixed price for the task.

In this situation, you can set up a work resource for the consultant on the basis that their standard rate is zero but there is a cost per use.

• Got the Resource Sheet and Add a New Resource
• In our example, we will set the Standard Rate to zero, but a Cost per Use at $400. This will give us the consultants fixed cost for providing consultant services on the contract.
• In this instanced we will set the accrual to the End of the task.

We will travel then back to the Gantt Chart and assign the Resource that we just created to the task. Now when we select the task, we can see all of the resources assigned, as well as the fixed costs notes in the Task Information dialogue.

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Simon C

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!