Budget cost fields in MS Project

Underbudget007,
Let me start by answering item 2 first. Is your baseline cost the same as your budget cost? That depends on how you set up your plan. If you used a top down approach, (often popular with management), then the cost for each task would in effect be the "budget". Or, even if you used a bottom up approach, and declared the developed cost for each task as the budget for that task, then when you set a baseline, the baseline will represent the budget cost.

Quite honestly, setting a "budget" for each task is not a good idea. In a real plan there are just too many variables that can affect how individual tasks perform. Remember, a summary line is NOT a task, but setting up a budget for each summary group might make sense.

If the baseline at each summary line is not the desired budget, and you should take a hard look at why it is not, then you can set up a separate cost field (e.g. Cost1) to represent the budget for that summary. Note that custom fields are not timescaled like the Cost and Baseline Cost fields are so the value will be a total value only. You could also then create a custom field to track the variance between Actual Cost and and your custom cost field. You'll have to play with the report format to get what you want, or close to what you want.

Project will always linearly spread cost for the full duration unless the cost is work based, (i.e. work type resource), and the assignment Work Contour field is set to something other than the default "flat". You can manually adjust the Budget Cost to whatever spread desired via the Task Usage timescaled values.

With regard to fixed costs not showing up in your cash flow reports, I'd like to see screen shots of your plan and the cash flow report.

John