One way to use Expenses for lumpsum cost in Primavera P6 to generate data for S-curves

When it comes to generating Primavera P6 data for use in Excel to plot progress s-curves, the recommended practice is to use Resources as basis for progress measurement in P6, but there are times when it is not possible to use Resources either because of corporate policy, non-availability of resource loading or personal choice.

A common alternative method is to use lumpsum cost as weightings in P6. And when it comes to using lumpsum cost, there are many ways to generate data for s-curves, including the use of either dummy Labour or Non-Labour Resource for cost weighting.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you another way to represent lumpsum cost in P6 using Expenses and this is based on Oracle’s recommendation that the equivalent of Cost (Lumpsum) field in good old Primavera P3 is Expenses in Primavera P6 (see page 68 of Migrating from P3 to P6)