Cash Flow Report in MS Project

MS Project is a good tool for managing project costs but it can be a bit tricky if you are trying to pull information from it for reporting.

 

For the projects I manage, each task has a cost category: Deferred and Expense. This is a custom column created to reflect Capex vs. Opex costs for the project.

 

I was trying to find a way to pull a Cash Flow (Cost month-by-month) report for the two Cost Categories which showed my total costs on the project like so:

Cost Category	January	February	March	April	May	June	July
Deferred SW	xx.xx	xx.xx	xx.xx	xx.xx	xx.xx	xx.xx	xx.xx
Expense	xx.xx	xx.xx	xx.xx	xx.xx	xx.xx	xx.xx	xx.xx

 

 

At first I was trying to play around with Views that showed me the information in the format I wanted and then export it in Excel. This obviously didn’t work. Getting project to filter by the Cost Category column wasn’t easy and the Summary Totals reflected a sum of the two categories.

 

That’s when I came across the Visual Reports feature of Project.

This report allowed me to choose the extra column I wanted (Cost Category) and create a pivot table in Excel which I could modify as needed.

 

 

Got exactly what I was looking for.