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

[Rajesh_Singh]

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

[Rajan kumar7]

Very helpful thank you !!!

[Vivekanandan]

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

[Sooraj Singh3]

thank you for explaining it 🙂

[philsharp]

This is very helpful, Rajesh. Thank you!

[Ned Chamberlain]

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.