Understanding Actual Cost Rollup to the Project Workbench

Project managers can roll up costs to the project workbench to review, at any time, the actual costs that are reported for any individual task in the project. For example, when material issues, labor, or completions are reported for a production task, the rollup collects the actual costs of these activities. A roll-up of actual costs also enables project managers to compare the estimated costs to the actual costs reported, and then analyze the cost variances, if any occur.

Use the Rollup of Actual Costs to Workbench program (R31P301) to roll up the actual cost information, which you collect for work orders throughout the production process, to these cost fields in the Project Workbench program (P31P001):

• Actual material

• Actual labor

• Actual other

• Actual special units

• Actual special amounts

Because a project consists of two different types of tasks, production tasks and nonproduction tasks, the system must retrieve costs from two different sources. Costs that are associated with production tasks are tracked through manufacturing accounting. These costs are stored in the Production Cost table (F3102). Manufacturing accounting, however, is not run for nonproduction tasks. The costs that are related to those tasks are stored in the F0911 table.

Note: Nonproduction tasks are posted to the Account Ledger with a batch type that is not a manufacturing batch type. However, to track those costs, you must complete the Subledger field with the task or work order number for which the costs are incurred.

Based on the cost classification for cost types and the accounts that are set up in the Cost Classification program (P31P301), the system evaluates all of the tasks in the project, retrieves their costs from either the F3102 table or the F0911 table, depending on the type of task, and updates them in the actual cost fields. The information in the cost fields is stored in the F4801T table.