Budget and Cost Tracking in Cerri Project (v10.xx)

Cerri Project is designed to support multi-currency and multi-rate management. This chapter presents the key features of cost and budget management. It serves only as a guideline, recognizing that every organization may have its unique rules and approaches to cost management.

The first financial component that is covered in Cerri Project is "Rates Management". A "rate" in the system can refer to one of two things; a resource’s internal cost or their external/ billable cost.

Cerri Project supports several levels of resource rates management and multi-rates management for each company and resource in the [Resources] module. The flexibility of the system means that standard rates can be assigned to companies and resources, while allowing for specific rate changes at the project or task level. The standard/default rates document is defined during the setup of the "Resources" module. It includes default rates as well as rates by activity type if "Multi-rate management" has been enabled in the General setup document.

The second financial component covered in Cerri Project is the "Project Budgeting". Project budgets can either be set for an entire project or broken out across periods. They are used to forecast or capture planned labor (internal and external) and non-labor costs and can be built using one or two axes, such as activity type and/or cost center. The third financial component Cerri Project covers is "Multi-currency Management". The system allows for the definition of one main currency and up to ten secondary currencies, and both company and resource rates can be expressed in any of these currencies. If multiple [Projects] modules exist, each module can have any one of the currencies defined in the [Portfolio] module as its main currency, with a secondary currency used mainly for display purposes. The same goes for "Archive" or "Consolidation" databases. It is also possible to define monthly exchange rates to ensure accuracy in financial calculation.