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Overview of Rate List and Cost List Management

This section provides background information about setting up and using rate lists and cost lists for projects. Rate lists specify what you charge your customers for various services. Cost lists specify what it costs your organization to provide those services. The difference between the rate and the cost for a given service is your profit margin for that service. Your organization can establish multiple rate lists and cost lists for use in different geographical areas or with different customers, but each rate list is associated with exactly one cost list.

It is strongly recommended that you use the following sequence of tasks to set up your rate lists and cost lists for project management:

1. Set up product records for the services you offer. For example, consulting hours for field engineers, field technicians, and so on. For more information about this task, see Displaying Existing Project Resources and Adding New Project Resources to the Product List.
2. Create cost lists. This allows you to estimate what it costs your organization to deliver each service and associate products with it. For more information about this task, see Creating a Cost List and Associating Cost List Line Items with a Cost List.
3. Create rate lists. This allows you to specify what you charge for each service, associate products with it, and associate each rate list with a cost list. For more information about this task, see Creating a Rate List and Associating Rates and Project Resources with a Rate List.
4. Associate the project with a rate list. You do this task as part of the process of creating each project. For more information about this task, see Creating Projects.
5. Setting rates for project staff. Any record added to the Team Workbook should each have the Resource field populated with a product record created in Step 1. For more information about this task, see Setting Rates for Project Staff.

Completing these tasks in the specified order allows rates and costs to default when you use the Team Workbook to staff projects. You can modify them as needed.