Budgeting projects & tasks

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Budgeting projects & tasks

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Budgeting

Budgeting allows the project manager to set a budget for a project or a task. The budget can be in money or time the project members can spent. A deadline can be part of the budget.

The project manager sets the budget, and can track the budget at any time. The project display has a marker showing the status of the project, and if the project is within its budget.

Questions:

• Pixtur: where do be enter this? Is there a new "project-view" like "projEfforts". Or just a function like "Edit project budget" combined with a display in the project's summary?
• Jmz: A new view for budgeting & management information must be created. We don't want to crowd the current views for project managers, do we?
• Pixturconfirmed

• Pixtur: does budgeting time for a task conflicts with "estimated time"?
• Jmz: No I don't think so. Estimates are given by the person who is doing the job. Budget is given by his supervisor.
• Pixturbut there should a a location where both a listed side by side?

• Pixtur: what happends when "time" AND "money" values are entered
• Jmz: Both are counted. If a project budget is 10 € and 1 hours, then the members can spend 10 € total for expenses, and work for max 1 hours total.

• Pixtur: what happend if the planned project-budget conflicts with the sum of the task's budget. It this an "either project OR tasks" option?
• Jmz: I think it's sufficient if the user is warned about the situation, and offered an automatic upgrade of project budget.

• Pixtur: Not sure if messing Dates (Deadlines) and Money is a good idea. Task already have a "planned_for"-field which could be used for this. Of course we could provide this field in the "edit project budgeting" form, if there something like this.

• Jmz: I don't indent to duplicate existing information; they're listed here for completeness, so people don't think that it's impossible to use deadlines with budgets. A project can have a budget in money, hours, plus a deadline for delivery to client.
• Pixtur also see my comments on milestones.

relating to persons:

• Pixtur: Each ProjectPerson / ProjectResource has an rate. Is this "money per hour" "money per day".
• Jmz: Usually it's huorly rates that count. And since people report efforts in hours, it's only natural to count hours.

• Pixtur: What about working later or on weekend?
• Jmz: The logic required for that is too complicated to be included here. However, there could be an option for "weekend" days which would then be listed seperately.
• Pixtur this was just a thought. Keeping it simple is always good. I the rates are copied into the efforts, we could edit those special efforts and correct the rate used there directly.

• Pixtur: If we change a projectperson's rate (say from 30€/h to 45€/h) does this affect the cost of already booked efforts? (I think it shouldn't, but that requires efforts to have something like "expenses" field.).
• Jmz: True. I would remedy this by having a rate per task. So a task has a rate of 30 € no matter who does it. This would be used for billing only, and would be invisible to the person doing the task. The person has his own rate he gets paid by.
• Pixtur: I still think the keeping the rate/expense in each effort would be a good idea. It's probably not much harder to implement, but keeps the system quiet open.

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