First of all,
thank you Vladimir, Rafael for your help with my material ref-book problem, I managed to create ref-books and corporate ref-books for activities, material and resource assignments - very useful. Unfortunately today I got stuck on something else. Usually during a project I want to create and monitor several Cash-Flows. The issue I have encounterd is that if the start/finish date of the milestones which I use to create cash-flows exceeds the finish of the project the sheduling of the project is pretty much killed using any algorithm and is very unpredictable.
Here project scenarios, my leveling options and results:
1. Financial Constraints, Optimization+, no other cash-flows except the one for Financial Constraints and no Finish [NLT] constraints
In this scenario there is no doubt that this is the optimal scheduling. From here on out I things get a little weird for me.
2. Financial Constraints, Optimization+, another cash-flow Cost-Income (income has a separate cost component with the unit cost of -1) and no Finish [NLT] constraints.
This cash-flow is represented by the expendituresres of the project and the payments (this cost component has unit cost = -1) for the work done. The first payment is usualy made after 2 months from the start of the project and then montly.
As you can see the scheduling is not optimal.
3. Financial Constraints, Standard - Priority -> Start [ALAP], another cash-flow Cost-Income (income has a separate cost component with the unit cost of -1) and no Finish [NLT] constraints.
This is somewhat optimal, since the 2 financing milestones are not considered critical.
4. Financial Constraints, Optimization+, another cash-flow Cost-Income (income has a separate cost component with the unit cost of -1) and Finish [NLT] constraints; Finish [NLT] = to the best schedule without the second cash-flow and with financial constraints.
In this scenario the floats are minimal but the finish date is way off.
5. Financial Constraints, Standard - Priority -> Finish[NLT], another cash-flow Cost-Income (income has a separate cost component with the unit cost of -1) and Finish [NLT] constraints; Finish [NLT] = to the best schedule without the second cash-flow and with financial constraints.
In this scenario the scheduling is optimal, both for the activities/resources and from the financial constraint milestones.
This is a very fortunate example because the finish date of the last scenario matched the finish date of the project in which I didn't create the second cash-flow. I tried it with a slightly larger project and I got some pretty weird results. When I say I didin't create the second cash-flow I meant that none of the milestone dates surpased the finish date of the project finish milestone.
I hope I was clear and to conclude my somewhat ambigous question, I want to know if there is a way to avoid this kind of behaviour (I found that using Previous Version in sheduling doesn't mess the schedule but I don't know if it is good practice). Perhaps there is something I'm missing or I don't know.
I uploaded the small and large projects here: http://www.filedropper.com/desktop_16