Using Project Roles for Project Planning to Billing

Oracle Projects enables you to perform project financial planning, budgeting, forecasting, and billing by project role, as opposed to billing using internal-facing job names.

Using project roles as the basis for planning enables you to plan projects and estimate project costs by project role, import time-card entries by project role, and bill customers as per the negotiated project role rates. Even when you generate invoices, Projects enables you to generate invoice lines by project role, offering greater transparency into billing numbers.

Key Tasks

Use project roles to:

1. Plan, budget, and forecast by project role during the early phases of a project, when the exact people who are going to work on the project are unknown. Add required project roles to the project and directly create work plan or financial plan by project roles and perform high-level planning.

2. Capture project role along with person details on labor cost transactions.

3. Bill labor cost transactions using rates defined by project role.

4. Report by project role.

Note: Performing actual labor costing using cost rates by project role is currently not supported.

Here's a table that illustrates how you can use project roles at various stages of the project management lifecycle.

Project Role Related Tasks in the Project Management Lifecycle

S. No.	Role	Task	User Step	Benefits / Comments
1	Sales Representative or Project Manager	Creates a prospect project before the project starts.	Adds project roles and effort in the Manage Project Resources page.	The application derives the cost and bill rates for the project role resources and calculates the total cost and bill amounts for the project, giving you high-level project estimates.
2	Project Manager	Creates work plan or financial plan using project roles.	Performs project role based financial planning to capture the financial details by role before actually beginning work on the project.	You can also perform work planning by project role and update the work plan to the financial plan.
3	Project Team Member	Enters time cards for work done.	Captures project role information when entering time cards.	NA
4	Project Accountant	Imports project costs associated with actual hours spent on planned tasks.	Imports time card entries with project role details and updates project roles associated with previously imported project costs using the adjustProjectCosts custom operation in the Project Costs REST API. Project accountants can also analyze project cost distributions by project role in the Manage Cost Distributions page. Project managers can use the Manage Project Costs page to view project role information associated with these costs.	NA
5	Project Manager	Reviews project progress and actual effort numbers to report project progress and create revised effort and financial estimates.	Uses Project Control to track the current status of tasks and measure the amount of work remaining.	Simplified project effort and financials tracking.
6	Project Billing Specialist	Bills customers on incurred costs using rates defined by project role.	Runs the Generate Invoice process, which picks up the unbilled cost transactions, determines the bill rate applicable to the transaction, and generates an invoice for the incurred costs.	Invoice lines are generated by project role, offering the customer greater clarity into project effort and costing.

Associated Setup Tasks

You must perform the following setup tasks to use project roles consistently across the project lifecycle.

Setup Tasks to Plan by Project Roles

• Set up project roles

• Set up financial plan types

• Set up project plan types

• Add project role resource format to the associated primary resource breakdown structure

• Set up rate schedule types and resource formats for project roles

• Add project role rates to contract bill plan

Setup Tasks to Bill by Project Roles

• Create invoice format with grouping by project role
• Associate project role based invoice format to contract bill plan