Create a report that shows costs per month (in Microsoft Project)

Once you have set up your project and assigned resources, you might want to know what the total costs per month are. Or if you don’t want to know, your management will probably want to know :-). In this article you’ll learn how to show costs by month. By the way: If you are new to MS Project, you’ll find my e-book The 80/20 Guide to MS Project very helpful, because it explains the basic concepts of Project in a beginner-friendly style. I am using Microsoft Project 2016 in this example, but my instructions will also work with older (2013) and newer (2019++) versions.

Show project costs by month: here are the steps

I assume you want to see the total monthly costs of your project. That is, including labor costs, costs of materials used, travel expenses and anything else you added to the budget. To get show monthly costs, go to the Task Usage view: On the right side, you can see the calendar view where hours are shown. The good news is … instead of hours, we can also show costs. But first, let’s collapse the work breakdown structure so that we can see only the project summary task (the summary task that covers our entire project. To collapse the structure, click on the black triangle left of the project name: Now, you should see only one line for the overall project: How can we show costs instead of hours in the right side of the Task Usage view? Easy. Right-click in the window and choose Cost. Also, de-select Work, because we don’t want to see working hours. Et voilà! Now you can see the total monthly costs for your project:

From there on, you can export the data into Excel or do whatever you want to do with it.