Standard costs in Development Planning

Standard costs and learning budgets

All costs used by development activities and resource activity requests must be defined as standard costs. Standard costs are used for both estimated and actual costs.

You can assign estimated standard costs to development activities and/or to resource development activities.

• When you assign costs to development activities, you enable the following automation:

  • Any costs flagged as "Include in Catalog" will be added up and the total displayed on the catalog.

    Note: The system can only total costs of the same currency. If flagged costs are not in the same currency, no costs display.

  • Resource activity requests for development activities that exist in the system automatically inherit the standard costs that match the resource currency from the development activities. Resource managers can immediately see the impact of the requests on their budget allocations.

    Learning managers can modify the standard costs inherited from development activities for specific resource activity requests. They can add and remove standard costs. So the managers may see changes to the costs (and to their budget allocations) as the budget planning evolves.

• If you assign standard costs only on resource activity requests:

  • The "Include in Catalog" costs do not show on the catalog.

  • Resource managers have to wait for learning managers to add costs to resource activity requests before they can see how the activity requests impact their budget allocations.

You assign actual costs only to approved, completed, withdrawn, or canceled resource activity requests. You can use these methods:

• Calculate the actual costs automatically from the development activity standard costs as of the date of the session completion or the date of the calculation (if the session is not yet complete).

• Specify actual costs manually.

• Calculate the actual costs, then make manual adjustments

(French resources only) Hours outside of work costs

Standard costs are also used to track hours outside of work costs. The process uses the basic functionality of standard costs with some modifications.

Hours outside of work standard costs associated with an activity will default to both DIF and non DIF requests. However, the number of units for such costs on non-DIF requests will be zero and the learning manager will not be able to modify hours outside of work costs on non-DIF requests. They can remove those costs because they are not applicable to non-DIF requests. Learning managers can modify hours outside of work costs for DIF requests.

See (French localization only) Hours outside of work tracking and costs.

Standard costs without learning budgets

If you do not use learning budgets, you can only track estimated costs at the activity level.

• Costs are maintained only at the activity level. The system does not track of individual resource activity costs.

• You can associate only flat-amount or activity-specific costs to a development activity.

• Any costs flagged as "Include in Catalog" will be added up and the total displayed on the catalog.

  Note: The system can only total costs of the same currency. If flagged costs are not in the same currency, no costs display.