Rego’s Everyday Life

A blog about my work at Igalia.

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:

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:

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:

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 ;-)