Hi all!

My wife is still trying to decide which tool they will be using at her organisation, currently 50 employees + 50 consultants approximately, running lots of concurrent projects. Over the weekend she got the task of forecasting three projects that are running and the respective project managers gave her Excel files with various information about their planned activity.

Now, the data is in the form of planned number of hours per week (for the next 3-6 months) for the involved members. Typically 40 or 20, but some people only being available during specific periods. Some are employees and some are consultants. The consultants have individual rates and they are the "cost" in all this, and an interesting twist is that the managers that themselves often are consultants, often do not know the rates! But disregarding that part - how do you approach such forecasting in LP? I have made the following observations:

1. In LP we need at least one task per member in order to "put the hours" somewhere, ok, fine, doable.

2. But... the rates mechanism (the beta stuff, haven't played with it, only read about it) are only used for reported actual spent hours, right?

3. And AFAICT there is no report that can show me "upcoming hours per month" and of course not "upcoming cost per month".

So is there stuff in the pipeline (like more reports and the ability to connect a rate to "planned" hours?) or do I need to take some other approach to be able to do forecasting like this?

regards, Göran