cost loading

Ok, so I did get the budget cost to spread evenly by putting in a unit/day of 1 which just gives me the cost spread evenly by original duration.Then I wanted to do an automatic update with the progress spotlight but when I did it, I lost all my budget cost! Can anyone please help me out? I cannot figure out what I’m doing wrong and it seems like it should be a fairly simple exercise.

Kari,
Your resources don’t have Price/unit and calculate cost from unit is tick. You need to remove the tick or mark on all resources assigned if you don’t want to link your cost from units. Under Activity Window-> Resources tab, right click and select Customize Resources Column and under General select Calculate cost from unit. Once the column is show remove the tick. Alternatively use Resource Window and show column Calculate cost from unit and from the first resource row remove the tick. Highlight all resources and while the cursor in on Calculate cost from unit column press Ctrl+e (fill command) and that should remove all tick from resources.

Thank you, Rodel, for your response. I did as you said and unticked the Calc cost from unit selection.

What I am ultimately trying to do is update the schedule and show my earned and actual cost tracked against the budget of the project. I am using the Progress Spotlight and the Update Progress features to automatically update the schedule. But when I do this, the actualized activities lose their budgets completely. Needless to say there are no actual or earned cost either. Does anyone have a clue why this is happening? I just want to automatically update the schedule and get a new cost spread. Help!!!

Kari,
Progress Spotlight use Planned dates and not current activity date. Meaning if you run a progress spotlight and planned date is behind or ahead of schedule (not the same as current date) it will update the schedule based on planned date and ignore current date.
Another thing that spotlight do is based on planned date progress it will calculate planned units. If you manually type your cost and calculate cost from unit is tick from the assigned resource (not on resource library) and your resource price/unit is zero then all your manually input cost will be overwritten by the zero (ex: 100 unit * 0 price/unit = 0) that is why all budgets and actual cost are back to zero. If calculate cost from unit is un-tick then P6 will ignore cost on calculation and use only units and you need to manually update your cost (all cost manually inputted are retained). The only way you can deal with this is update resource Price/unit on resource library and make sure that calculate cost from unit are all tick or mark on all resource assigned to activity.

Thanks for your reply, Rodel. I will have to keep in mind what you said about the progress spotlight. As for the my cost quandry, the answer had to do with using budgeted units to calculate budget cost on a $1.00/LS price/unit resource setting. This way, when the project is updated, the duration percent complete is used to determine actual and remaining cost. It seems to be working the way I wanted so that’s what I’m going with.

Thanks again for your responses.