Cost Variance Report

Cost variance project reports in OnePager look great, and they're easy to build with a 15-day free trial:

1. We'll start with a basic Microsoft Project (or Smartsheet) project plan:
   

   There are three key fields in this project plan:

   • Cost: This is the actual cost of each task.
   • Baseline Cost: This is the original budget for each task's cost.
   • Cost Variance: If there is any difference between budgeted and actual expenses, the cost variance will show it. Initially, the cost is in line with the budget, so there is no variance. This will change later in this example.
2. Import your project plan, alongside the costs, into OnePager. If you don't already have OnePager, you can get a free trial. You can set up your report initially like this:
   
3. Initially, we get a Gantt chart that looks like this. So far, not much cost information, but that's about to change.
   
4. To import cost information, go to Home > Chart Properties > Rows/Swimlanes and click on the Text Column Properties button. This will let us bring in a column for the different costs that we want to track:
   

   In this case, we'll set up a column for "Cost" and a second column for "Cost Variance" so that we can compare them side-by-side.

5. Click OK, and this cost information will appear in the project report:
   
6. Now, let's go back to Microsoft Project and create some cost variance. We'll change the actual costs of the first two items so that one is above the budget and one is below. This causes the cost variance to change:
   
7. To update your OnePager report, go to Data > Add Snapshot. Our first snapshot was on October 5th, so we'll add a second snapshot on November 23rd, OnePager will re-import the cost information and display it in the project report:
   
8. This is pretty good, but we can make the cost variance report even better by color-coding each task based on its cost variance. To do this, go to Home > Chart Properties > Task Bars and click the Manage Rules button for conditional formatting:
   

   With these simple rules, tasks that are over-budget turn red, while tasks that are under-budget turn green. Tasks that have no cost variance stay gray.

9. The report immediately becomes a lot more colorful, and a lot more informative based on these simple rules:
   
10. If you need to view how your cost has varied over time, you can go to OnePager's View tab and click back and forth between your different snapshots, like this:
    

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