Enter Software/License Costs to Project

[Anon Anon]

I am relatively new to the CA PPM tool and I have a question surrounding one-time project costs.  The tool is very straight forward in being able to add in human resources and post transactions against their time.  But, if I have a one time cost to a project that I want to put in the CA PPM tool, how does one accomplish that?

 

I have reviews such things as creating an Expense resource and trying to utilize that, in which creating the non-labor resource is easy enough.  But, how do I then apply the rate as a single, one time charge against the project financials?

 

Thank you.

[navzjoshi00]

Have you created a rate matrix ?

 

NJ

[L.Elias]

I dont think its as simple as creating a non-labor resource, though that is an interesting idea I'll have to think about some. Right off the bat though the issue I see would be you'd have to post time to that resource somehow. I think the "proper" answer would be to use a transaction, with a licensing transaction class or something similar (we have SW_LIC in our environment, not sure if its OOTB or we added it at some point)

[Legacy User]

The steps to capture non-labor costs are pretty straightforward. The CA documentation can give you a great walkthrough - my meager attempts at an explanation are below.

1. Be sure you have transaction classes set up under the financial settings to classify your costs into categories. In our organization this is consulting, software, hardware, or travel.
2. You should also have resource classes too. You can keep this simple if you want to mirror the resource types - Labor, Expense, Material, Equipment.
3. Set up your rate matrix to assign a zero rate to all non-labor resources.
4. Create the non-labor resource(s) on the Application side of Clarity. Upon creation you select the appropriate type of resource. We use equipment for hardware and expense for everything else. You could create multiple resources if you wanted to track spend to different vendors (as in consulting, perhaps) or different types of spend (software licenses vs. ongoing maintenance, for example).
5. Under the financial properties for this resource, assign the transaction class and resource class.
6. In order to post a transaction to one of these non-labor resources the resource usually needs to be assigned to the project team first. We accomplish this easily by adding all these non-labor resources to our basic project templates that people use to create new projects. This makes it invisible to the end user.
7. Post transactions through transaction entry to reflect your actual spend. We instruct our users to leave the quantity field = 1 and enter the same dollar value in cost and rate fields. We post transactions weekly but you can do this on the schedule that best fits your organization.
8. Note that after you post transactions the financial plans on the project will show lines related to these costs. In our company these lines are actually added up front as project managers plan for their project costs - the actuals populate later with the transactions.

Transactions can be XOG'ed in to Clarity if you want to pull them from another financial system. There are good resources around to help with that, if it's something you want to tackle.