Historical Labor Import Notes
For comparison to planned hours and amounts, you can import the actual hours and amounts (both cost amounts and billing amounts) that your employees have charged to projects.
DPS uses the historical labor to provide comparisons of planned hours and amounts to actual hours and amounts, and to calculate JTD and estimate-at-completion (EAC) values.
If you import a labor transaction for a project, and no assignment exists for the employee for the WBS element to which the labor is charged, the import creates a new assignment. The start and end dates for that assignment are set to the plan start and end dates of the WBS element.
Each time you import historical labor, the JTD date on the Planning Settings form () is automatically updated to the latest historical transaction date in the DPS database.
Recommendation: If you use more than one of the historical data imports (Historical Labor, Historical Expenses, Historical Overhead), it is recommended that you run all of those import processes on the same schedule and that the import files all include transactions from the same transaction date range.
Import Availability
- Accounting is not activated.
- Resource Planning is activated.
Required Fields
- Valid employee number, mapped to the DPS Employee Number field
- Valid full WBS element ID, mapped to the DPS Project ID field
- Date associated with the labor transaction the employee charged to the WBS element, mapped to the DPS Transaction Date field
The WBS element ID should be the full element ID that includes the IDs for higher-level elements. Use the delimiter character specified on the Plan Settings form () to separate the levels in the full element ID. For example, if project 01 has a phase 002, the WBS element ID for that phase in a historical labor record in the import file should be 01.002, not just 002. In addition, the WBS element must be at the lowest level of its branch of the WBS; you can only enter planned labor for the lowest-level elements. If this field is blank or the ID does not exist or it is not at the lowest level, the record is not imported, and an error message displays.
If you import labor daily, the transaction date could change daily as well. However, the common practice is to use the date of the last day of the timesheet period as the transaction date for the historical labor they import.
Overtime Hours and Amounts
An imported historical labor record can include overtime and special overtime hours and cost amounts as well as regular hours and amounts. However, those overtime hours and amounts are not displayed separately in DPS. If you import overtime or special overtime, the hours and amounts are combined with the regular hours and amounts.
Adding Amounts for Previously Imported Hours
If you import historical labor hours without the corresponding amounts and later want to bring those amounts into DPS, import the same transactions again with the amounts but with 0 hours.
Multiple Currencies
If your company is set up to use multiple currencies in DPS, this import supports importing cost and billing amounts in different currencies. If the project (cost) currency for a project is different from its billing currency, the cost amounts and billing amounts in the import file for that project should each be in the corresponding currency.
Updating Existing Records
Unlike most other import processes, you cannot use the import process to update historical transactions that were previously imported. All historical transactions that you import are treated as new records.
Plan Publication Status
You can import historical labor for a plan regardless of whether it is currently marked as published or unpublished.