Using Project Activity Costs

To keep things simple in HR Partner, you can just set up a Default Cost for your Project Activity that will be used as the cost basis for all your employees when they enter timesheets against that particular activity.

However, sometimes things may not be that simply, and you might have a need for different costs for different employees, based on their experience or seniority.  For instance, a manager in an activity called 'Meeting' may cost the company $40 per hour whereas a more junior line employee may cost $25 per hour.

You can set up employee base costs for each activity by going to Projects > Activities and then clicking the 'Maintain' button under the 'Employee Costs' column.

This will take you to the employee cost maintenance view.

The important areas of this screen are:

1

This area shows the default cost for this activity that will be used if there are no employee overrides below.

2

This section shows all the individual employee cost overrides that have been set up.

3

This button lets you add a new cost override (or delete an existing cost override), either for individual employees, or in bulk.

4

This button lets you delete individual cost overrides.

To add a new cost override, just click the ' Add/Remove Employee Cost' button on the top right.  This will show you the following pop up:

This screen will either let you enter cost overrides by individual employees, or else as a group.  

You can also set the Currency that will be used by this particular employee, which is useful if you have multiple locations in your HR Partner company, and you will be charging your employee time based on the location they are working in (or else use the standard company location currency).

The important thing to notice here is the ' Select By' drop down.  By default, it is set to 'Employee' to let you select individual employee names.  However, in case you need to select groups of employees, you can also select them by:

• Employee
• Department
• Location
• Employment Status
• Position
• Tag

Whenever you change the ' Select By' drop down, the next selection box below that will also change depending on how you wish to select employees.  For example, if you change the 'Select By' drop down to 'Location', then the next field will allow you to select one or more of your company locations.  So if you wanted to change the cost for Full Time and Contract employees, you could do this by changing 'Select By' to 'Employment Status' then choose 'Full Time' and 'Contract' in the next box.

Now clicking the 'Add/Update' button will automatically add the new cost for employees that match the condition specified in the pop up dialog box.

Deleting Custom Employee Costs

You can delete any existing custom employee costs in almost exactly the same way, by clicking the 'Add/Remove Employee Cost' button to open the dialog box, then specifying your selection condition (i.e. by Department, Location etc.) and then instead of clicking the green 'Add/Update' button, you instead click the red 'Remove' button.  This will delete any custom employee costs that match the condition specified.

You can also delete individual cost overrides from the listing in the lower half of the screen by clicking the red trash can icon next to the employee name.