Actual Cost what does it really include ?

[DagmaraGa]

Hi all, I'm trying to get in the depth of Finances numbers appearing in Workfront. What does Actual Cost in Finance Section on a project Details means? Actual Cost - is all billable and not-billable hours x hour rate of assignee. I've created the hour report which tells me about Resource Utilization. It shows me me Hours>Actual Cost. In my understanding it shows Total Actual Cost for billable task so far. For some reason Actual Cosst number in Project Details>Finance Tab shows me different number. There is difference in between them £2k about. Is there anything else what Workfront sums up to the Actual Cost in overall ? It's worth to mention that if I pull in the same hour report Project Overhead>Actual Cost - the number is exactly the same like Actual Cost number on a Project Details>Finance tab. To add to this, there is no Actual Expenses on a project. To make it clearer I've attached screenshot of Finance Tab and Resource Utilization report at the same point.

[EricLu2]

Hi: Help: https://support.workfront.com/hc/en-us/articles/217612358-How-Workfront-Calculates-Finances Actual Cost is the sum of Actual Labor Cost and Actual Expense Cost. Actual Labor Cost is actual hours charged to a project * cost per hour. Actual Expense Cost is arbitrarily declared in the Expense section. I don’t know why the Finance cost is different than the report. There are a few things I look at when I have such a quandary. 1) Project Action - Recalculate Finances. I make sure the finances have been recalculated. This is a frequent problem - incomplete recalculation, so I force it to recalc just to be sure; 2) If you sum up the cost of hours charged to tasks, and it is different from the cost under Project Details-Finance: a. Maybe there are Actual Expenses declared (I know you said there aren’t in your case): b. Maybe there are hours of type “Project”. These hours appear when: i. You allow people to charge time to the project directly (not common); ii. Someone deleted a task that had actual hours charged to it (really common); c. The project hours will not appear in a task cost rollup, because they are costs associated with the project, not the tasks; d. To see if you have project hours, go to the project, Hours, group by hour type, or create a filter that only shows hours of type “Project”; I’m not sure I’ve helped, but let me know what questions you might have… Thanks, Eric

[EricLu2]

In rereading that help article, it appears that the “Cost Type” impacts what gets added into the Actual Labor cost and what doesn’t. We only have one Cost Type, so its never a factor for us. Do you have different Cost Types? Thanks, Eric

[DagmaraGa]

Thanks Eric. I've been on that helpsite, but couldn't find anything what could explain the difference. And just gone through your points,and it turn out there are some actual expenses added, just not billed yet. So Actual Cost on Finance Tab it's sorted now as it's equal my Actual Cost from a project+ Actual Expenses on it. Thanks for pointing it out, obviously had to look at this twice! :) What's even more confusing, I have just pulled Project Overhead>Actual labour Cost and Project>Actual Labour Cost (still in the same hour report) and the numbers are much different as well..

[DagmaraGa]

It's the same for every user - User Hourly.

[GregBe1]

One thing you mentioned was that " Actual Cost - is all billable hours x hour rate of assignee". Is that right? I would have expected the actual cost to include non-billable hours as well.

[DagmaraGa]

thanks for pointing it out! I thought I mentioned it as well. Changed now.

[EricLu2]

Hi: How do you differentiate between billable hours and non-billable hours, if not using the Hour Type? Thanks, Eric

[DagmaraGa]

We use Cost Type - User Hourly and Hour Type it's different for every team. But Hourly Rate is assigned to every single user. Different for permanents workers and different for contractors. For billable - we've got Revenue Type>User Hourly, for not-billable Revenue Type>Not Billable.