I use 'Time Required' for tasks as Cost Accounting but it starts over at $65,536

[TS OGrady]

I have been using the 'Time Required Max and Min' as a way to tally up costs for projects.  When I look at the total project it will sum Time Required for this project.  That all works fine until it goes over the magic number of 65,536 hours and then it starts over at 0.  This would be fine if I knew how many times it had gone past 0.  If they simply added a field with a numeric value that could be summed to its parent I wouldn't have to do this workaround.  Have other people found a way to sum across Projects subtasks, or something similar?

And of course, I love MLO.

TS

[Dwight]

Hi, TS. The "Time Required" fields were, in my opinion, created to hold hours not money. 65,536 hours is a very large project, according to my calculations it could hold all of the tasks for a project of eight people working 40 hours a week 50 weeks a year for about four years.

You should probably send an email to MLO support asking them to expand the field, possibly changing it from integer to floating point to accommodate cents or whatever. I think that would be a useful suggestion. However, it takes a while for feature updates to make it through the development/test/beta cycle, so you should look for a workaround to use in the interim. For example, if most of the costs are manpower, you could track the hours and convert to money later. Or, you could set a new convention that a "1" in the time required field means 10 currency units, such as £10 or $10 €10?

-Dwight

[TS OGrady]

Dwight,

I agree that I am 'misusing' Time Required for my own purpose, so I can't really complain about it.  A number of us have requested a new variable such as 'Cost', and if it were able to be a negative number, then I could create a whole accounting system based on Project summing up to parents.  I realize I am trying to turn MLO into what 'should' be done in a spreadsheet, but it is so nice to have all my project info in one app, and want that to be MLO.

I like your idea of just shifting the decimal point over, so $100 is represented as 10h.  

Since my real problem is just keeping track of when the value goes over $65,536, I plan to just group project costs into quarterly subtasks. In my case, that will always keep the sum below $65,536, and when I sum the year it will be obvious from 4 quarterly values if it has rolled over multiple times or not.

I will email MLO again about some sort of 'Cost' variables, so I don't have to torture their app in the way I do.

thanks for your thoughts,

TS