Representing negative cost and income

Cost and income in a project are usually entered as positive values. For example, the supply of a consumable resource may cost £1,000, or the income from a task may be £500. However, you can also record cost and income that has a negative value. One example of when you might want to record negative costs is to represent an adjustment figure for a cost. For example, if you have an initial cost of £10,000 and you negotiate a 10% discount, you could use a negative cost allocation to represent the £1,000 discount rather than editing the amount of the initial cost allocation down to £9,000.

You can configure cost centres to have negative cost or income amounts by default. You can also record negative cost or income amounts against cost allocations, cost and income rates and consumable resource allocations that relate to any cost centre - regardless of whether or not the cost centre itself has a negative default cost or income amount.

In order to be able to enter negative amounts of cost and income, you must ensure that the Allow calculations in numerical fields check box on the General tab of the Options dialog has been cleared.