If the project has ceilings on hours, cost, or indirect rates, for either billing or revenue calculation purposes, you must next set up those ceilings. For labor hour ceilings, enter the ceiling by either labor category or by employee or vendor within a labor category.
Manage Hour Ceilings screen — Use this screen to set a ceiling (or not-to-exceed) number of hours by Project Labor Category.
Manage Employee Hour Ceilings or Manage Vendor Hour Ceilings screens — Use these two screens to set a ceiling (or not-to-exceed) number of hours for a given employee or subcontractor within a Project Labor Category. The ceilings that you set in these two screens do not have to total up to the amount you entered on the Manage Hour Ceilings screen. In fact, the two sets of screens are not dependent upon each other. You could set up a ceiling for a particular employee within a particular labor category, and then set up an overall ceiling for the labor category on the Manage Hour Ceilings screen. Costpoint tracks the employee ceiling separately from the labor category ceiling. Costpoint applies the employee or vendor ceilings first before applying the overall labor category ceiling.
Cost Ceilings — For cost ceilings, use the Manage Direct Cost Ceilings screen to set a not-to-exceed amount for a given account. You can use this screen to make an account not billable (such as subcontractors on a Time and Material project), and to set a revenue or billing ceiling for an account (such as setting a ceiling on Travel). You can set a ceiling at a summary account level. An example of this is Travel — if you have separate detail accounts for Travel, you could set the ceiling at the summary level for travel instead of trying to break out the ceiling by sub-account. If you do not want an account to be included in revenue or billing, set the ceiling to zero. A zero ceiling excludes both negative and positive values from being included. DO NOT SET A NEGATIVE CEILING OR A POSITIVE CEILING ON AN ACCOUNT THAT CARRIES A NEGATIVE BALANCE!
Indirect Rate Ceilings — For indirect rate ceilings, use the Manage Burden Cost Ceilings screen to set a not-to-exceed rate (ceiling) for a given pool, within a given account. You can also set up an override rate, which is used in the revenue calculation process instead of the target rate, to derive target revenue. You can set up each of these types of rates so that they affect the revenue calculation, the billing calculation, or both. Additionally, you can set a ceiling or override rate for a particular pool at a summary account level (see example of summary accounts in the preceding paragraph).