What Is an Activity?

An activity is a phase, task, operation or other component within an activity group. Activities provide a framework for establishing and collecting budgets, costs, revenues and statistical information. You can structure activities to meet your specific information and reporting needs.

The activity group determines the number of levels you can have in an activity structure. For example, an activity structure created to track an organization's projects may contain three levels: project, phase and task. Budgets, costs, revenues and units for tasks roll up into phases, which in turn roll up to projects.

You can define three types of activities:

• Posting activities are activities at the lowest level in the structure. Activity transactions must contain a posting activity and an account category. Costs, revenues and units from transactions are consolidated into balances in posting level activities. If you use activity budgets, you will create them in posting activities.

• Summary activities are activities at higher levels in the structure. Budgets, costs, revenues and units from posting activities are consolidated, or rolled up, into balances in the higher-level summary activities.

• Contract activities follow the same rules as summary activities. Lower level summary and posting activities roll up into contract activities. You can create a contract activity at levels 1-4, but there must be at least one posting level activity beneath the contract. You can have multiple contract activities within the same activity group, but there can be only one contract activity within a given branch.