Surely you have noticed that you can save pricing information in Merlin resources. You may enter standard and overtime rates, costs per project or per assignment. Should you then assign the resource to an activity and enable the display of the columns ‘Planned Costs’, ‘Expected Costs’ and ‘Actual Costs’ you will see how much the assigned work will cost if it happens as planned.

At this time point the values of ‘Planned Costs’ and ‘Expected Costs’ are the same. ‘Actual Costs’ is empty. This is ok, there has not been any actual work recorded yet.

So let’s say we plan an activity of 10 hours on a resource working 8 hours. The expected and planned costs will show 10 x standard rate per hour, because Merlin will know, that this resource will work 8 hours at max on the first day of the assignment and the remaining 2 hours on the next day.

The planned and expected costs won’t change just by this fact. Merlin cannot plan the resource to stay the remaining 2 hours at work, as it’s calendar indicates that it is not available. So expected costs cannot contain overtime, because one cannot plan overtime. When it happens, we enter this in the ‘actuals’, where we can record the starting and ending time points of the activity, the total amount of work and the amount of overtime.

So in our example, if a resource actual worked 10 hours and 2 of them were overtime, this is exactly what we enter in the ‘actuals’ tab:

The ‘Expected Costs’ and ‘Actual Costs’ are now showing the same value containing overtime costs, which is more than the ‘Planned Costs’.