Cost is a general term used to denote the money spent setting up and running the program or project. It may be direct costs, such as the money spent on the infrastructure or indirect costs, such as accounting or legal expenses.
Amplify allows for Costs to be categorised by a configurable set of Cost Categories. The categorised cost breakdown can then be explored using the Investment dashboard or analysed using the Amplify reporting templates.
As with much of your Initiative Dashboard options, Costs must be enabled in your Administrator Settings, as would be your Cost Categories.
Each Initiative can be considered as an investment towards the delivery of Benefits. Usually, you invest in an Initiative in the first few years. On the Initiative, you can enter the forecast, actual and budget costs per month. Click on Cost tab on the initiative dashboard to record expenses.
The total Costs for a program also contains costs incurred by the projects within. However, on the Cost dashboard, you will only see the initiative's direct costs.
In the bottom section of the cost dashboard, there are data entry fields to enter cost values. The graph in the upper part gets updated when you enter values in the data entry fields.
Amplify has a quick toggle feature, which can be used to input costs in a fast way, assuming you are applying the same value to each input field. Select the up/down/ and side arrows to apply duplicated values to fields quickly.
See also