A student recently asked how one can provide subcontractors and other stakeholders monthly budgeted costs for the life of the project. This information is readily acquired in Primavera P6.
Subcontractors working on your project may want to know how much money they need to set aside monthly for project related costs. This monthly project cost information may be gleaned from the activity usage spreadsheet in Primavera P6 Professional. The trick is knowing where to set the data variable to retrieve and present cost on a monthly basis.
This article describes a quick tip on how to extract the monthly budgeted total project cost for the life of the project using Primavera P6 Professional.
Your estimators have done a detailed bottom up estimate of your activity costs to arrive at the total planned cost for the project. This is great! Now you know the budgeted cost of the project. But your subcontractors performing the work need this planned cost information in a slightly different format. They want know the budgeted cost of work on a monthly basis.
This adds a little bit of a time element to the planned cost value. Somehow we need to extract a time phased budgeted cost of the project. Again, this is possible in Primavera P6 Professional provided you know what spreadsheet to view and where to set the variable to capture the budget on a time phased monthly basis.
In Figure 1, we have our demonstration project.
Figure 1
The activity table displays the budgeted labor cost, budgeted material cost, and budgeted total cost of the project down to the activity level. This is helpful to know, but your subcontractor, however, needs to the cost of the project on a monthly time period to set aside the appropriate funding. To provide this time phased budget information we turn to the activity usage spreadsheet. In the bottom layout tool group we select the activity usage spreadsheet icon, Figure 2.
Figure 2
Again, the key is knowing how to update the spreadsheet field, Figure 3.
Figure 3
Our spreadsheet is currently capturing remaining labor cost. We, however, want to track the budgeted total cost for each month. This is done by right clicking on the spreadsheet field and choosing spreadsheet fields from the popup menu, Figure 4.
Figure 4
In Figure 5 we simply select budgeted total cost from the time interval category.
Figure 5
Now in Figure 6 we have the budgeted total cost of the project for each month.
Figure 6
Confirm that the monthly budgeted costs add up to the total project cost.
It is also possible to capture the cumulative total budgeted cost for each month. To find this, again, right click on the spreadsheet field and select spreadsheet fields from the popup menu, Figure 7.
Figure 7
Add the cumulative budgeted total cost to the list of selected options to display in the spreadsheet fields, Figure 8.
Figure 8
In Figure 9, we have the cumulative budgeted total cost of the project for each month, in addition to the budgeted total cost.
Figure 9
Now we can easily compare and confirm that our monthly budgeted total costs add up to the cumulative budgeted total project costs at project end.
Summary
The budgeted total cost of the project is important to know, particularly, in cost constrained projects. The subcontractor actually performing the work may ask for monthly budgeted project costs of the project to support their funding efforts.
Primavera P6 Professional has an activity usage spreadsheet that may provide both the budgeted total cost and cumulative budgeted total cost of the project. In this way project managers may provide a time phased monthly project cost to their subcontractors.