grichards

This suggestion is concerning the Labor Price Tab on labor items and how it relates to the PDM in a project.

If you have an item set to Fixed Price, the PDM Unit Cost and Unit Price field can be edited to affect the price...this seems fine. It makes sense and correlates to the unit Cost/Price of Other item types.

If the item Labor Price is switched to Variable or Both, the PDM Unit Cost and Unit Price field switch to the cost/Hr and Sale/Hr fields. This is a potentially confusing UI element. By mapping one field to two other fields with no clear indicator of which field you're actually editing (because the grid doesn't correspond to the name of either of them) It's being left up to the user to guess at what is actually going on. Furthermore, if the user IS using the labor rate from phase then the Unit Cost/Price in the PDM have NO affect on the actual price whatsoever even though you can still edit them.

I would suggest NOT REMAPPING the unit Cost/Price fields in the PDM to the Cost/Sale per hr fields in the Labor Price tab.

Since the cost/sale fields are essentially an override to the phase labor rate, i would suggest making the user edit those values through labor Price tab.

long term i would suggest REALLY looking at updating the database schema of the master product table. If you have two different pricing schema for products it makes sense to have two different tables to handle the different items. I worry that the core software is heading down a dead-end with the current database design. too flat. not extensible.