Extra Costing with SharePoint Currency Columns

Earlier we showed you the basics of IntelliGantt for SharePoint costing with respect to assigned resources and their hourly rates. Now we would like to show you how IntelliGantt will recognize other currency columns in your task list and roll these values into your estimated Cost value.

When you add a Number Column to your SharePoint task list and format it with the Currency option, IntelliGantt will both rollup the column values and add it to your overall Cost column. 'Cost' is a reserved word in IntelliGantt and it represents all your estimated costs rolled together. Additional currency columns are treated as estimates also and, as a result, are added to the overall cost. In the near future you will have 'Actual' values that will roll up all your actual costs in the same manner (basically all currency columns starting with 'Actual'), but that is a future blog post.

For now, let's look at how the estimated cost rollup works. Starting with this example we see two tasks that have assignments and associated assignment costs with them. Additionally, there is an 'Extra Cost' field that is either blank or zero.

Remember you can see how IntelliGantt calculates an assigned cost by either looking at the particular assignment and seeing the Work, Hourly Rate and Level of Effort values:

Or by looking at the 'People' form and seeing the general setting for all a resources work, their standard hourly rate and effort.

This assigned cost goes right into the Cost column that IntelliGantt recognizes as the aggregated estimated cost field and rolls it up for you. Now let's add a value to the 'Extra Cost' column and see what happens. Let's first look at task 'Two', which has neither assignment nor extra cost values.

When we added $10 to the 'Extra Cost' field, two things happened. One, that extra cost was rolled up within the 'Extra Cost' column and two, it was also sent over to the 'Cost' column to be added to the sum estimated cost. We've highlighted all the affected calculations for you.

Similarly if we add $10 to the row right above which has an assignment, first we see the value added and rolled up in the Extra Cost column and also added to the estimated Cost column (and rolled up).

In this way IntelliGantt helps you keep track of both overall and individual costs. At a glance you can see what the entire, total estimated costs are but still see sub sections like assigned costs and 'extra costs' defined by you to help track your business processes.