Money based cost monitoring system in LibrePlan
Last weeks in Igalia I’ve been working in a new feature that will be included in the next LibrePlan releases. Summing up, the new feature consists of providing a method to monitor the cost of the different projects inside LibrePlan based on the money spent regarding to the original budget. Before in LibrePlan you could monitor the cost based in hours reported regarding to assigned hours, but it was not possible to do it checking the money spent.
Feature description
The result of this new feature from the users point of view has two main parts:
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A new field called budget has been added together with the hours input for any task in the WBS view. Now, the user can specify the budget for every task. BTW, this field is also available in projects and tasks templates.
- A new bar over the tasks in the Gantt view. This bar represents the money consumed at this moment comparing to the task budget. Then, you can check the progress of your tasks regarding the money you have reserved for it and the real amount spent.
In order to calculate the money spent in a task, the application uses the information in the work reports related to the cost categories of the different resources and the type of hours devoted to each task. Using all that entities, LibrePlan is able to calculate the how much money you have already spent to perform a concrete task.
Some screenshots
The new budget field can be edited from two places:
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WBS view:
New budget field in the WBS view
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Details tab in task edition pop-up:
New budget field on task edition pop-up
The new money cost bar can be enabled/disabled with a new button in the Gantt view:
Money Cost Bar in Gantt view
The information about the exact money spent can be read in two places:
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Task tooltip in Gantt view:
Information about budget and money spent on task tooltip in Gantt view
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Imputed hours tab in task edition pop-up:
Information about budget and money spent on imputed hours tab in task edition pop-up
About the implementation
As you know LibrePlan is entirely a free software project. Not only its source code is released under AGPL, but because of we do all the development in an open and public environment. Like for any other feature developed in the project you can read the analysis and implementation notes in the project wiki.
About the implementation issues, I’d like to highlight the new class MoneyCostCalculator which is in charge to calculate the cost of any task in terms of money. This class is only used for the new feature explained above, however in the future it could be useful to create some new reports, add money cost information to earned value chart or use in other parts of the application.
We hope you enjoy this new feature! Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any question about LibrePlan. And remember that Igalia offers a wide range of services around LibrePlan, just in case you need our help ;-)