Work, costs & budget

Dates tell you when a task happens. Money and work tell you what it takes to make it happen, and Gantt Excel tracks those in five separate numbers per task plus two figures for the project. They are easy to confuse, so it is worth being clear from the start about which is calculated for you and which is yours to fill in.

01 The five numbers on every task

Each of these is a column on the task sheet, and each has a matching box on the Task Form. Three are calculated, two are not:

Resource Cost is deliberately separate from the three cost bands. It is labour only, priced from the rates on the Resources sheet, and Gantt Excel owns it — anything you type there is thrown away. The three bands are yours: put materials, fees, hire charges and whatever else belongs to the task into them.

The five are not one block on the sheet, which catches people out when they go looking. Resource Cost and Work sit close to Resource, before % Complete. The three cost bands — Baseline Cost, Est. Cost and Actual Cost, in that order — sit much further right, past % Complete and past the Actual date columns, immediately before Notes.

All five arrive hidden on a new chart, along with several other optional columns. So if you cannot see one, nothing is switched off — it has simply never been turned on. Tick it in the Columns to show list at Gantt Excel → Settings → Settings → Columns, where a ticked column is a shown one. That same list is how you move a column along the row, so you can bring the three cost bands up next to Resource Cost if you would rather see them together. Hiding a column is only about the view — whether costs are tracked at all is a separate switch, in section 08.

02 Work — the person-time field

Work answers a different question from Duration. Duration is how long the task occupies the calendar; Work is how much person-time it consumes. A 4-day job with two people on it takes four days of calendar and eight days of work.

Left to itself, Gantt Excel keeps Work in step for you:

It reads the Estimated duration only — never the Baseline or Actual one — and the resource count is the number of names in the Resource cell, with a minimum of one. An unassigned task therefore has Work equal to its duration.

The unit follows the chart. On a day-based chart Work is in person-days; on an hourly chart it is in person-hours. Change the duration or add a resource and Work re-calculates itself immediately, both in the grid and in the open Task Form.

Worked example — the kitchen refit

Four trades are on the Resources sheet with these day rates:

“Fit kitchen units” runs Mon 6 July → Thu 9 July, a duration of 4 days, with Dave and Sam both assigned. Work calculates as 4 × 2 = 8 person-days, and the label above the box reads Work (Auto).

03 Auto and Manual Work

The calculation is a sensible default, not a rule. Two people rarely spend every hour of a task on it — often they are each there half the time, or one is only needed for the first day. When the real person-time differs, type your own figure into Work.

The moment you do, Gantt Excel pins that value. The label changes from Work (Auto) to Work (Manual), the grid cell picks up a grey fill so you can spot pinned rows at a glance, and nothing recalculates it again — not a duration change, not a new resource, not a refresh.

Continuing the example: Dave and Sam are each on the kitchen units for half of each day, so the true figure is 4 person-days, not 8. Type 4 into Work. The label reads Work (Manual), the cell greys, and it stays at 4 even when the task later stretches to 5 days.

1Work. Planned work — person-days, or person-hours on an hourly chart. 2The label. Work (Auto) or Work (Manual) on a task; plain Work on a parent. 3Resources. Who is assigned. Their rates drive the cost below. 4Resource Cost. Calculated labour cost. Read-only in practice. 5Costs. The heading over all four money boxes, not a field itself. 6Estimated, Baseline, Actual. The three cost bands you type yourself.

1. Work. Planned work for the task — person-days, or person-hours on an hourly chart.
2. The label. Reads Work (Auto) while Gantt Excel calculates the figure, and Work (Manual) once you have pinned one of your own. On a parent task it reads plain Work, with no suffix at all — a roll-up is never pinned, so there is no state to report.
3. Resources. Who is assigned to the task. Their rates — Cost per Day, or Cost Per Hour on an hourly chart — drive the Resource Cost below.
4. Resource Cost. The calculated labour cost. Typing here is pointless — the calculation overwrites it.
5. Costs. A group heading over all four money boxes, not a field in its own right.
6. Estimated, Baseline and Actual. The three cost bands, all of them yours to fill in.

04 Resource Cost — how it is really worked out

Resource Cost is the labour cost of the people on the task. It is calculated from two things: the rates of the assigned resources, and how much of each person’s time the task takes.

The rate is per unit of the chart’s own time, exactly as Work is. On a day-based chart the Resources form labels it Cost per Day; on an hourly chart the same box is labelled Cost Per Hour, and the whole calculation runs in hours instead. Everything below is written in days because the kitchen refit is a daily chart — read “day” as “hour” throughout if yours is not.

Two details in there are worth slowing down for, because getting either wrong makes the number look inexplicable.

The rates are summed, not averaged

Every name in the Resource cell contributes its own rate. Assign Dave (£280) and Sam (£300) and the combined rate is £580 per day — not £290, and not £280 for “the task”. Each extra name adds its own rate to the total.

Work ÷ the number of resources is what gets multiplied

That second half is the time each person spends on the task. While Work is on Auto it comes back as the task’s Estimated duration — an auto Work is duration × the number of resources, so dividing it by that number returns the duration. Pinning a Work figure of your own is the only thing that changes it:

So it is one calculation, not two — the Auto case is the same arithmetic with Work still equal to duration × the number of resources. A pinned Work is you saying “these people are not on this task full-time”, and the cost drops to match.

When Resource Cost comes out blank

The cell is deliberately left empty, rather than showing zero, in each of these cases:

• No resource is assigned. Unassigned work carries no labour cost.
• The resource is Organization. That name is the project’s default-calendar anchor, not a person you can bill — the Resources dialog blanks and disables its cost box for that reason.
• The assigned resources all have a rate of zero, or no rate at all.
• The row has no duration — which in practice means a milestone. Rate × zero is zero, and a zero cost is written out as a blank like any other. A priced resource on a milestone therefore shows an empty Resource Cost, and nothing is wrong.
• The task is a parent. Its figure comes from the roll-up instead — see section 06.

05 The three cost bands

The Task Form groups four money boxes under a Costs heading. One is the calculated Resource Cost; the other three mirror the three date bands exactly, and they exist for the same reason — so you can see budget slippage the way you see schedule slippage.

Unlike the date bands, the cost bands have no Copy Est. button — there is nothing to copy across in one click, so each is typed. All three accept a positive number only; anything else is refused with Invalid cost value. Please enter a valid number. and the cell is cleared.

Worked example — where the money went

Carrying on with “Fit kitchen units”. The units and fixings were quoted at £2,400 when the plan was approved, the quote was revised to £2,600 before work started, and the final invoice came to £2,780 after a worktop was cut wrong.

Baseline against Actual shows the task ran £380 over, and because the baseline never moved, that overspend stays visible for the life of the project. The £1,160 of labour sits alongside as a separate figure — it is not inside any of the three.

06 Parent tasks roll everything up

Open a summary task and every field on this page is locked. That is the point: a parent’s numbers are sums of its children, so there is nothing for you to type. Edit the child tasks and the parent follows.

• Work on a parent is the total of its children’s Work. Gantt Excel says so if you try to type there: This is a Parent task. Work is automatically calculated based on child tasks.
• Est. Cost, Baseline Cost and Actual Cost are the totals of the children’s — This is a parent task. Its costs are calculated from its child tasks.
• Resource Cost is the total of the children’s too, and gets its own wording: This is a parent task. Its resource cost is calculated from its child tasks.

A parent’s own Resource Cost is never calculated from a resource assigned to the parent. If a summary row has a resource on it, that name is ignored for costing — only the roll-up counts. So put your people on the tasks that do the work, not on the headings above them.

07 The project budget

Everything above is per task. The budget is the project-level pair, and you set it when the chart is created — Gantt Excel → Gantt Charts → Add New Gantt Chart, in the Budget Details group:

• Estimated Budget — what you expect the whole project to cost.
• Baseline Budget — what was approved.

Both are optional, and to change them later you reopen the project details with Gantt Excel → Gantt Charts → Edit Project. But “optional” looks different in the two places these figures appear. On the form, a budget you never set shows as an empty box. On the budget line below, there is no blank to show — every figure on that line is formatted as money, so an unset budget reads £0.00, not a gap. If a zero would give the wrong impression to whoever reads the sheet, fill both figures in.

Gantt Excel then keeps a running comparison in the header area above the task list, refreshed every time a cost changes. It reads:

The Project Budget half is what you typed on the new-chart form. The Task Costs half is added up from the tasks themselves — and it totals only the top-level rows, so nothing is double-counted when a parent has already summed its children. The currency symbol comes from Currency Symbol in Settings, and defaults to $.

08 Switching costs on and off

Two tickboxes in Gantt Excel → Settings → Settings control the whole of this page:

• Enable Costs — the master switch. Turn it off and the four money boxes disappear from the Task Form entirely, and the budget line above the task list is cleared — not frozen at its last figures, but emptied outright. Tick it back on and the line is rebuilt from the tasks. Work is unaffected; it is a person-time field, not a cost one.
• Calculate Resource Cost — decides whether Gantt Excel prices labour for you. With it off, the Resource Cost column becomes an ordinary number you can type into.

The same Settings page is where you set the Currency Symbol used in the budget line. Rates themselves live elsewhere, one per person on the Resources sheet — see the Resources guide.

09 Common questions

Related: Resources, calendars & working days · The Task Form · Summary tasks, indenting & the WBS · Settings