1. Engineer to Order Implementation Guide
  2. Understanding Cost and Account Classifications

Understanding Cost and Account Classifications

One of the most important priorities for a project manager is the ability to control the costs that are associated with a project. To maintain control of the budget, the project manager must be able to review the actual costs that are reported for any project task at any point in time throughout the project life cycle. The actual costs must be associated with the same cost buckets that are available for the estimated costs so that the project manager can compare the estimated, budgeted, or planned costs with the actual costs at any stage of the project. In addition, mapping costs to the correct cost buckets enables the system to roll up costs for each level of detail to the next parent level in the work breakdown structure and to the project level. Examples of cost buckets that are used in the Project Workbench program (P31P001) are labor, material, other, and special. You set up these cost buckets as UDCs in the Cost Classification UDC table (31P/CC).

The Cost Classification program (P31P301) enables you to map costs to cost buckets either by cost type or by account number. These options accommodate the fact that a project can contain two types of tasks: production tasks, such as discrete manufacturing work orders, and nonproduction tasks, such as project management tasks, travel, and so on. You can retrieve the actual costs that are associated with production tasks from the Production Cost table (F3102), where they are stored by cost type. The costs that are associated with nonproduction tasks are stored in the Account Ledger table (F0911). Therefore, you must associate the appropriate accounts with the user-defined cost buckets to make costs for nonproduction tasks visible to a project manager and roll them up to higher levels in the project structure.

You can define cost type and account mappings for one of these combinations:

  • Branch/plant and project number of a particular project.

  • Branch/plant of a project, where the project number is blank.

  • All branch/plants and projects (both fields remain blank).

The previous list defines the hierarchy that the system uses to retrieve the correct categories for displaying costs in the Project Workbench program and for rolling up actual costs. This information is stored in the Cost Classification table (F31P21).