Cost Centres
A Cost Centre is like an account that we use to allocate money to or from tasks in our project. Tasks can take expenditure from or provide income to a cost centre.

Costs can either be fixed i.e. a cheque payment, or variable so that they are dependant on time, work or the amount of resources used.

Cost centre libraries can be organized in a flat structure or in a hierarchy eg/ Overall Costs broken down into individual costs. You will need to adopt a hierachical structure if you want to record or report on cumulative information from a group of cost centres.
Creating New Cost Centres




To create the Project Cost Group:
 Select the Cost Centre folder on the left hand side.
 Right click in the right hand window and from the menu select New Folder.
 Change the name to “Project Costs” and press ENTER.
 Double click on the folder so that the right hand window appears empty.
 Right Click with the mouse and select New Cost Centre
 Type in “Labour” and press ENTER
 Type in the remaining cost centres: Materials, Plant and Sub-contractors pressing ENTER after each one.
Setting Cost Centre Defaults

Default information can be set that will apply each time a cost is allocated through your project. For example, each cost centre may have its own appearance once it has been assigned to a task in the bar chart.

To set the appearance of a cost allocation bar:
 Right click on the Labour cost centre and select Properties from the menu. The properties dialog box is displayed

 Click in the “Foreground Fill Colour” field in the Appearance section and select a choice from the colour menu.

 This can be repeated for each Cost centre.


By default a cost allocation is set to spread over the duration of the task. The allocations can either be spread over a period of time or happen at once (a ‘point spend’). They can happen within the duration of the task or outside it, eg/ delayed payment for materials 10 days after delivery.

“Materials” will be a one off cheque payment, hence a cost at a single point in time (Point Spend), that will be paid after receipt of the goods.

 Right click on the Materials cost centre and select Properties from the menu.
 Select the ‘Default Assignment’ tab.
 Put a tick in the Point Spend box
 Under the Start heading, change the ‘Relative to Task Start’ to ‘Relative to Task End’ (this will make the point spend milestone appear at the end rather than at the beginning of the task)
 Also under the Start Delay type in 10ed (this will make the point spend milestone appear 10 elapsed days after the task)
 Click on Close.


Hope this helps.

Matthew Edwards

Hi Laurie

PowerProject cost centres are a way of keeping track of costs as well as progress and resource usage.

It is an Add On if you are following Earned Value mechanisms as well as other processes.

I have used PowerProject for 19 years and never yet used the Cost Centres for normal planning operations.

If you need to use it then it is very simple to do so - otherwise don’t bother.

Best regards

Mike Testro