post Relation between Resource Plan, Cost Plans, Time Cards & Expense Lines in SPM articles

Relation between Resource Plan, Cost Plans, Time Cards & Expense Lines

Rajesh_Singh — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 08:29:29 GMT

Dear Community members,

I'm writing this article to show a simple relation between Resource Plans, Cost Plans, Time Cards & Expense Lines.

Let's understand terms in simple language

Resource Plan - Project-related records where the project manager can manage and track resources requests.
Cost Plan - Project-related records where the project manager can capture the costs of projects.
Expense Lines - Project-related records where the project manager can track expenses incurred.
Time Cards - Project-related records where project resources can record the time, against the assigned tasks.

Let's Understand relation in the simplest manner:

To make it simple we will consider only the Cost plan, Timesheet & Expense lines generated against project resource plan(we will not consider operational resource plan in the above scenario)

Consider Project resource has been requested for 100 hours for the month of January.
- This will give you Resource Planned hours of 100 for the Fiscal period of Jan 2021.
- Using a labour rate card will also give you Resource Planned costs for a given fiscal period.

Cost Plan gets auto-created as soon as the resource was requested.
Cost plan can be created manually for other types of expenses too
Whenever a resource plan is created at the demand or project level, the system will automatically create its corresponding cost plans with cost-type as "Labor Capex". (Refer My previous article for more details)

When allocated/approved resources submit the timesheet and it gets approved this gives Resource Actual Hours

When the timesheet gets approved, then it generates an expense line record in a pending state.
Once Expense lines get processed using labour racecards, it gives Resource Actual Costs
Approved Resource request hold all details like Resource Planned/Actual cost and Resource Planned/actual hours (dotted line represent the same in the above diagram)
Cost plan too holds, Resource Planned/Actual cost details.

Please let me know if you enjoy reading this article.

Regards
Rajesh Singh

Re: Relation between Resource Plan, Cost Plans, Time Cards & Expense Lines

Rajan kumar7 — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 04:44:42 GMT

Very helpful thank you !!!

Re: Relation between Resource Plan, Cost Plans, Time Cards & Expense Lines

Vivekanandan — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 09:22:49 GMT

Good resource for a project manager, kudos and expect much more from you! 🙂

Re: Relation between Resource Plan, Cost Plans, Time Cards & Expense Lines

Sooraj Singh3 — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 09:56:08 GMT

thank you for explaining it 🙂

Re: Relation between Resource Plan, Cost Plans, Time Cards & Expense Lines

philsharp — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 11:51:55 GMT

This is very helpful, Rajesh. Thank you!

Re: Relation between Resource Plan, Cost Plans, Time Cards & Expense Lines

Ned Chamberlain — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 16:06:39 GMT

This would be great to also highlight the relationship between the project task and the project in this expense line processing. Key fields like sub_tree_root and project fields on project and project task are critical.

Re: Relation between Resource Plan, Cost Plans, Time Cards & Expense Lines

CarolynN3989674 — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 09:45:01 GMT

Finally, I simple way to explain the relationships for PMs. Thank you!