Thank you for the responses.  Peaks and troughs won't work - I need to report actual spaces available on a daily basis (and hopefully weekly) basis.

I think I have figured this out with the following, BUT

1.Dictionary/Resource and adding Parking as a Material resoure

2.Start with Activities that define the current parking quantities.  For each activity, under units/time put in how many spaces there are in each area by putting in the spaces/day

3. For construction activities, enter how many spaces each activity adds or removes during it's duration, defined in the resource as space/day

4. View/Show on Bottom/ Resource Usage Spreadsheet, showing my Timescale in days.  It shows the daily spaces from the data date forward.  However , I have the following problems:

a. It only shows data from the data date forward; no past numbers.  I would like to be able to show the client they had the total number of required spaces last week, etc. Is there a way to do this?

b. It shows both LOE and Task Dependent activity resources, and both positive and negative resouces in the table. However, for Task Dependent Activities that are not on the critical path, it only shows the resource for a short time (I think the duration less the float).  This seems to be based on an incorrect total amount of the resource it is calculating in the Activity Detail, and I have no idea why.  I need it to show the same quantity of resources /# of spaces for each activity for the duration of that activity.  For now I'm only putting resources on LOE or critical activities.  But I need to address this so it still works as progress changes activities from critical to non critical & vice versa.  Is there any other way to address this other than creating extra LOE activities that only measure quantity of parking?

bb. If I change the logic of an LOE activity, the activity finish date changes properly.  However the Resource finish date does not recalculate.  Is this what the option to "Level Resources" would do, so basically I cannot track parking in Contractor? or is this a totally different problem as described in this post:

http://www.planningplanet.com/forums/primavera-version-pm5-pm6/421633/re...

Would MS project allow me to do?  If there is a way around this, the remainder of the challenges are:

c. Is there some way to show in the Gannt view, the "units/time" for each activity - ie the number of spaces assigned to each activity?  For now I have put the quantity in the Activity name, but the field exists - I would like to display it in the Gannt view.

d. The way I defined the resource per 1 above lets me add sub resources.  So I could do an overall Parking resource, that has subresources of deck parking and surface parking, and further define each by Deck A, Deck B, Surface lot 1, 2 etc. However, if I add the resources as one of these subresource, I cannot show the total parking in the resource use spreadsheet - it only shows one subresource at a time.  I think I must just be missing some sort of setting, but cannot figure it out.

e. I tried to address item d using resource codes, but that is apparently NOT any way to do this either....

f. I'm fairly certain there is an efficient way to do this in the program, but I would be more comfortable with a better understanding of how the program treats non labor resources - budgeted, Unit/time, remaining, etc.  Can anyone direct me to a site or article that explains this?

g. To show the correct data on a printout, from the Resource Usage Spreadsheet, I right click and select "Remaining Units." If I select Actual I get blanks, and if I select budgeted only the critical items have data.  So I think this has something to do with all of the above, and that I'm not quite doint this correct...