How to budget within OmniPlan3

OmniPlan OmniPlan for Mac
#1

Hello, I am using OmniPlan3 to plan a 3y product development project. It has been great to block out the tasks, group those tasks, and organize them based on duration. I have started to try to allocate resources to these tasks, but have hit a wall. I work at a company. We have salaries, not hourly rates (that are known to mere mortals) and most of my work is being done by outside contractors. For example, I have a fixed monthly cost for a partnership I have with a university. I am charged monthly for this, but am spending down from a fixed amount. As they buy equipment, the monthly charges sometime rise dramatically. Is there any way to see how much I have remaining in the amount I have budgeted for them? I have not found any way to budget other than in Excel which is where I am basically “managing” my project from. This seems great for making an initial gantt chart for your board, but when it comes to actually running the project (and hopefully keeping track of things in the same project) I can’t seem to find the most basic functionality for this.

What am I missing?

Thanks,

R

#2

@rbardsley OmniPlan doesn’t currently offer a dedicated budgeting tool, so the exact functionality you’re looking for may not currently be possible in OmniPlan (specifically, OmniPlan does not offer the ability to calculate remaining available budget). That said, there are a couple of types of costs you can record in OmniPlan in addition to hourly rates for resources - is it possible that assigning a fixed cost for a task or assigning the resource a cost/use in addition to cost/hour might be helpful?

#3

Thanks for your response. No, I really was hoping to be able to use this for project management, not just project planning. It has been great for entering project tasks, and organizing them to make a gantt chart. But, now that the gantt chart lead to a successful meeting and the project received funding, I now have to execute against the plan. This means I need to track things like FTE, external contracts, and budget spend down. So, it doesn’t look like I will be able to use this software for actually managing the project over time. Thanks.