Default Cost Elements are cost buckets that you define for your company, prior to the Asset Design phase, to hold certain planned costs and planned hours. The planned cost categories are planned material, work and miscellaneous costs, therefore four project cost elements can be defined to record these planned costs and the planned hours for design objects of your company. Through the project cost element functionality it is possible to map user-definable project cost elements in one's company to these fields when an active project connection exists on a design object. The definition of these user-definable cost elements as well as a default project dictates that these will be the cost elements, by their defined names, for entering planned costs on design objects. If no default project has been defined, the cost elements for entering planned costs on design objects will be those cost elements mapped to the user's default company. If no default project or user default company has been defined, the cost elements take default names. You can update costs in the planned cost element fields only if the design object is connected to a project in the default company. In addition if you re-set the planned cost element field headings or modify the default planned cost element fields the application should be restarted to get the correct names again.
It is also possible to define cost elements, in addition to the system-set ones, and to enter planned costs and hours on these cost elements. Once all the planned costs and hours on a design object are entered, the total planned cost and total planned hours of a design object can be observed as the sum of planned costs and sum of planned hours respectively, on all the cost elements associated with that particular design object.