Specifying a budget

[Lakshmisv1]

How can I specify a quarterly budget for a group of tasks ?

e.g Actual effort for all tasks in a  quarter (April 1 - May 30) should not cross 1000 hours.

Thanks

[#2]

The budget is reset every quarter.

[#3]

Lakshmisv1,
Normally a budget is associated with cost but your example talks about effort which is work. However, either way you can set up a "budget" but there is no flag in Project that will be raised if the budget is exceeded. That's something you will have to monitor yourself.

John

[#4]

Thanks for your reply John.

I defined a Project level custom field X which calculates [Budget Work] - [Work] to see the variance from Budget Work at project level
This works fine and the value comes correctly. You are right though that there is no flag raised and I have to monitor it.
My problem is that I would like the value of [Budget work] to be reset at the start of each quarter and it should be only applicable to the activities of that quarter. Please advise on how to handle that.
Thanks

[#5]

@Lakshmisv,

I can only see a couple of options.

The first involves a manual calculation of Budget Work minus Cumulative Work for a 3 month time span. Reset the budget each quarter and run the calculation.

The second option requires VBA to essentially do the calculation and dump the result in a custom field at project level.

I only use the desktop version of Project so perhaps there are more ideas with enterprise versions. Maybe someone else will jump in with their suggestions.

John

[#6]

@John-project Thanks John for your reply.
I tried a slightly different approach. In Task Usage, I set the budget for each quarter manually. (I have done this for just 3 quarters for the time being but if the project extends, I will have to set it for subsequent quarters manually too!)
But I achieved what I wanted. I can see the Budget Cost and Cost for each quarter.

I wish though that I could see BalanceBudget (a custom field) = [BudgetCost]-[Cost] too in task usage. Have to figure out how to do that!

[#7]

@Lakshmisv 

You can use a custom field formula for budget cost minus cost but it will only apply at the Project Summary task level.

Does that not work for you? If not, what exactly do you want?

John

[#8]

Thanks for your reply John. What I need is text1 for each quarter. How can that be displayed?

[#9 · Accepted solution]

@Lakshmisv

Simple answer. You need VBA to do that.

John

[#10]

Thanks for confirming that it is only possible through VBA.