Combining Projects, Phases, or Tasks

You can use the Key Conversions utility to combine existing DPS projects, phases, or tasks. For example, if you combine two projects, Project A into Project B, they become one project, Project B.

Prerequisites

The following prerequisites must be met before you can combine projects, phases, or tasks using the Key Conversions utility:

• The projects must belong to the same company.
• The projects must have the same charge types.
• The WBS elements to be combined must be of "like" kind. For example, you can only combine phases into phases or tasks into tasks, or a project with a two-level WBS into another project with a two-level WBS.
• If you use multiple currencies, the projects must have matching currencies. The project currency for the two projects must match, and the billing currency for the two projects must match.
• The project plans cannot be checked out to another user.
• The project plans cannot have unpublished changes.
• If the project plans include planning data for expenses or consultants, the planning levels for expenses and consultants must be the same.

If these prerequisites are not met, the utility displays a message to notify you of the issue, and the projects, phases, or tasks are not combined.

What the Utility Does

When you combine project numbers, the utility does the following:

• Combines budgets and data in the project financials tables.
• Deletes the From project's billing terms and invoice detail (you cannot reprint old invoices).
• Updates the accounts receivable paid period to the most recent period.
• Combines plan data at all levels. Any resulting duplicate WBS rows or resource rows are merged into one. Assignment start and end dates remain the same except when two like assignments are merged. In that case, the earliest start date and the latest end date from the two assignments are used.

When you combine phase or task numbers, the utility does the following:

• Combines budgets and data in the project financials tables.
• Deletes the billing terms and invoice data (if this is the last phase or task for a project).
• Combines plan data at the phase or task level and at all lower levels. Any resulting duplicate WBS rows or resource rows are merged into one. Assignment start and end dates remain the same except when two like assignments are merged. In that case, the earliest start date and the latest end date from the two assignments are used.

If You Have Resource Planning But Not Accounting

If your enterprise has activated the Resource Planning module but not the Accounting module, you can still use the Key Conversions utility to combine projects, phases, or tasks. You cannot, however, use it to combine elements for planning levels lower than the task level (or lower than the phase level, if you do not use tasks). If you use the Key Conversions utility to combine projects, phases, or tasks, and project plans with more than these three WBS levels are involved, all lower planning levels are combined appropriately as well.

Be aware that changes this utility makes do not affect the information in the source applications from which you imported the projects and related data. If the corresponding changes are not also made in the source applications and you import additional data related to the projects, it is likely that incorrect planning data will result.