As a Merlin PM you can schedule your projects and create professional Gantt charts meeting your professional requirements. You can balance the magic triangle and keep not only track of time but also of the costs, budgets and financial aspects of your projects.

To define ‘default work rates’ for unassigned tasks (activities), just use the according field in the project settings (via File > Project Settings > General > Default Work Rate)

Whenever you assign a resource to an activity, the entered rates will be used as a basis for the cost calculations:

• Standard Rate: Rate per assignment in the specified unit. For example, $10/hour or $100/Kg.
• Overtime Rate: For all assignments, working more hours than considered working hours. For example, $10/hour
• Cost per Project: One time cost when the resource is assigned to any activity in this project. If the resource is assigned more than once, this cost will be counted only once.
• Cost per Assignment: It is added each time this resource is assigned to an activity.
• Accrual: You can decide how to accrual your costs. The choices are start, prorated, immediate or end
• Actual: Actual Standard, Overtime and Cost per assignment can be added here so you can compare the planned vs. the actual values.

So… how do the planned vs actual values calculate?

• Planned work costs take into account standard rate, cost per assignment and project.
• Actual work costs take into account actual rates if defined, otherwise calculate using the standard and overtime rates.
• Expected work costs use both rate sets if they are both defined.

Some examples

Planned, Actual and Expected costs:

Resource’s pricing information:

Overtime can be entered over the “Actuals inspector”, when updating in “absolute” mode. It is to be understood as the amount of overtime contained in the total amount of actual work entered in the field “Normal”.

So in the examples above, there was an actual work of 7 hours and 2 of them where overtime:

Actual costs of those tasks calculate as follows:

• 5 hours of standard rate + 2 hours of overtime rate
• if no overtime rate is defined: 5 hours of standard rate
• If actual rates are defined: 5 hours of actual standard rate + 2 hours of actual overtime rate