Working with Resources - Overview

Resources

The term "resources" refers to the people, machines, facilities, materials, or other types of resources required to complete a project.

• In SmartSimple any person can be designated a resource and assigned to projects.
• If you need to create other types of resources such as equipment, materials and facilities, go to the "company" and use the New Resource menu.
• If you need to define additional resource types, use Global Settings, Business & System Configuration and Resource Type to add other types of resources.

Resource Costs

All resources can be associated with three types of costs:

Direct Costs – are associated with each individual resource. You can define:

• Four direct costs – Base cost, plus cost 1, 2 and 3.
• Billing rate – the recommended rate when billing the resource.
• Currency – the currency used to calculate resource costs.
• Cost unit – hourly, daily, or per use.

Indirect Costs – are associated with the company or role of the resource. Indirect costs are added to the direct costs when calculating the resource costs.

Resource Costs can be in local currencies, but are converted to the project currency.

Switching Resources

In some instances you will not know which resources will be performing a specific task; in this instance you can use a number of approaches:

• Create a "generic resource" with average costs, and assign that resource when creating the estimate. Before starting the project, replace this resource with the "real resource". If you use this approach you may encounter cost variance, as it is unlikely that the average costs used for the generic resource will be exactly the same as the actual resource cost.
• Assign a team of resources to the project. This approach will be discussed in more detail in proceeding articles.
• Alternative resources can be switched or added after budget, provided the original resource has not entered any timesheets.
• Resources can be "disabled" after the project is live, if they have completed approved timesheets, but not removed them.