Simple Task Costing with SharePoint 2013

The IntelliGantt App for SharePoint 2013 let's you extend the basic user profiles within SharePoint so that you can tracking costs with your Task List items. For each SharePoint person you can give them an hourly rate and a level of effort value that IntelliGantt reads. Then if you assign that person to a task, IntelliGantt will compute it's cost. That is, duration in hours * level of effort * hourly rate. Here's the simplest example to get up and running.

First we must make sure every user profile in SharePoint has an 'Effort' and 'Hourly Rate' field. To do that you'll need administrative rights to your site collection. With these rights go to the SharePoint Admin Center.

Click on the 'User Profiles' and 'Manage User Properties link.

We will want to add these two fields to the 'Custom Properties' of the User Profile field template. Here we've already added the two fields.

The key here is to make sure the field names and data types are exactly what IntelliGantt expects. 'Hourly Rate' should have a field name of 'HourlyRate' and a data type of 'float'. Similarly, 'Effort' should have a field name of 'Effort' and a data type of 'float'.

Now we simply plug in the actual hourly rate and effort values for each user. The administrator can do this our the users themselves by editing their profile information.

When the IntelliGantt App for SharePoint 2013 pulls in a Task List (or two or three) it will check to see if the person assigned to a task has hourly rate and effort information. If so, then you will see cost information calculated for you automatically.