Working with costs

Projects always have to be completed within a certain budget, so when planning a project it is important to make realistic estimates of the cost of each task and any income that may be generated. In Asta Powerproject, budgets are represented by cost centres. You can have more than one cost centre in a project. For example, you may have one cost centre for Research and Development, another for Training and another for Advertising. There are two types of cost:

• Direct costs: costs that are assigned directly from a cost centre to a task. The cost can be fixed so that it remains the same regardless of the duration of the task or how many resources are assigned to it, or it can change depending on the task duration or the amount of work to be completed on the task. For example, you could specify a cost per day or a cost per every ten metres of pipe laid.
• Resource costs: costs that are associated with a particular resource, for example the resource's cost per hour. Resource costs are assigned automatically to tasks when the associated resource is assigned.

You can monitor the income and expenditure of your project's costs by creating cost histograms. Cost histograms can be simple, for example showing income and expenditure, or detailed, showing information such as profit and loss and cash figures. The following cost histogram illustrates the cost of a resource over the duration of a project:

Working with resources	Working with calendars

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Working with costs