allocating cost accounts
In the Open Standard
Johnny PainMember for 21 years
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hello everybody,
I have a little problem allocating cost accounts on my project.
see, I have a complete P3 project, with activities, resources, budgeted quantities, and due to the number of resources (700), I’d rather track the progress (yes, we need to track the progress with MSExcel) with cost accounts. I only use them as resources groups, to export tabular reports to DBF files.
the thing is, some of the tasks have multiple resources (2 max), and I need to allocate one cost account to one resource and another cost account to the other resource.
doing this task by task is quite easy, but I happen to have 21.000 activities in my project, so I tried to use global change.
the problem with the global change is that it allocates the cost accounts with the "last to talk is right" principle. the first global change allocates the first cost account to both resources (I specified a filter to update only the good resource, but it selects both each time), and the second global change does the same, but with the second cost account...
I also tried exporting to DBF, updating in MSExcel and importing back into P3, but it adds to my tasks a new resource (duplicated from the original one) containing the good cost account, but I now have 3 resources in my task... the 2 original plus the new one.
does anybody have a solution to this problem ? because the multiple resources concern like 6000 tasks, and I cannot afford to bypass at least 18000 hours in my progress figures...
thanks to anyone who knows !
Johnny
I have a little problem allocating cost accounts on my project.
see, I have a complete P3 project, with activities, resources, budgeted quantities, and due to the number of resources (700), I’d rather track the progress (yes, we need to track the progress with MSExcel) with cost accounts. I only use them as resources groups, to export tabular reports to DBF files.
the thing is, some of the tasks have multiple resources (2 max), and I need to allocate one cost account to one resource and another cost account to the other resource.
doing this task by task is quite easy, but I happen to have 21.000 activities in my project, so I tried to use global change.
the problem with the global change is that it allocates the cost accounts with the "last to talk is right" principle. the first global change allocates the first cost account to both resources (I specified a filter to update only the good resource, but it selects both each time), and the second global change does the same, but with the second cost account...
I also tried exporting to DBF, updating in MSExcel and importing back into P3, but it adds to my tasks a new resource (duplicated from the original one) containing the good cost account, but I now have 3 resources in my task... the 2 original plus the new one.
does anybody have a solution to this problem ? because the multiple resources concern like 6000 tasks, and I cannot afford to bypass at least 18000 hours in my progress figures...
thanks to anyone who knows !
Johnny
5 replies
Oldest first- 0James Barnes ·Next time you will put the costa ccounts in from the start ;)
an idea;
export resource per activity detail including cost accounts to Excel
In Excel, change the cost accounts as you need
AND add a prefix to all resource codes in excel (RES becomes NEWRES for example)
Reimport
Now you should have 2 sets of resources on each activity, one with no cost codes (RES) and one with the cost codes on (NEWRES), the new ones will all have a prefix and the correct cost code. Now;
Delete the old resource codes in P3.
You may need to go through and manually reset the resource code, if you want to get rid of the prefix.
Another way is to delete all resources in P3 once you have made the export, then you shouldn’t get duplication.
Remeber, back up before you do any of this! - 0Johnny Pain ·backup’s my middle name !
anyway, thanks for the tip.
onscreen, it looks like it’s gonna work, and I’m gonna try this today.
I think the char I’ll add as a prefix is going to be something like a dot, so I won’t have to manually correct the resources.
and promise, next time I’ll put the cost accounts from the start ! - 0Scott Sando ·I find this situation intriguing.
As a relative new-comer to this field, I was taught that cost accounts are an intersection of the work breakdown structure (WBS) and organisational breakdown structure (OBS). The situation described here sounds like the WBS is intersecting with the OBS twice. Shouldn’t the WBS be decomposed further?
OK, theory and practice don’t always align. I’d be interested in other’s opinions.
Scott
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