https://www.openproject.org/help/user-guides/time-costs/

Hi Niels,

Thanks for your time. Much appreciated. I have the plugin installed, but unfortunately I am still unable to get the desired result.

OpenProject meets my every requirements except this part.

The problem is that I would want to allocate budgets without knowing the unit costs and so on.

Hi Chris,

I’m not entirely sure what your specific problem is, but see if my response helps you out.

We have projects where the budget is not very well defined, and all we are told is the not to exceed amount. I find that OP is actually quite flexible in this regard.

Costs are broken down into labor cost and unit costs. We actually define our budget with the unit costs only, and then allow our employees to log their time as labor costs. OP will show the net results of labor applied to a budget that has only unit costs.

To start, I make sure I have some basic units defined for my costs plugin. In OP5.0, you go to Administration → Cost Types. The most generic would be a “lump sum” or “other” unit that has a per unit cost of $0.00.

Then, when I define the budget for the project, in Planned Unit Costs, I simply enter “1” for the unit, choose Other under the Comment heading, put a description under the Planned Costs heading (e.g. “NOT TO EXCEED budget for project.”) and then click on the pencil icon, which will allow me to manually enter the actual value of that budget line item. (e.g. 120000.00)

Make sure the budget has a name (Subject), and click Create to create the budget.

When you start building your work packages, you simply make sure to assign them to the budget you just created. Now, any logged labor costs and/or unit costs will be applied against the total value of that budget.

In the example above:

1. The name or subject of the budget. In this case, it reflects a lump sum total the customer has agreed to pay, and however much work gets done for that amount is whatever gets done. There are certain items that the customer has requested get done, but it is understood that other work will be required to provide a finished end-product. Anything unusual or extreme will be submitted as a change order and a new, separate budget will be created to track those specific task items and costs. All of my initial work packages are assigned to this budget, while any additional change order work packages will be assigned to their appropriate, authorized budgets.
2. The actual total amount entered as a single Unit Cost line item, as I described above.
3. The amount of money “spent” from this budget. This number is made up of both Labor Costs (spent time) and Unit Costs. In other words, all labor hours, materials, and other billable expenses.
4. Simply Item 2 less Item 3 to show remaining, and then a graphical representation of the percentage used.

Again, not sure if this is exactly what you are after, so if you can better define the problem, I’m sure we can find a better answer.

- Mike

I’ve work with the method as described above as well using OP 5.x now testing 7.02 but I cannot edit the planned costs using the pencil… anyone a tip on how to do this? Or is this changed on purpose? Cannot find the documentation on this.

thanks in advance.

@ Mike, your solution worked for me - thanks!