In Primavera P6 version 8.2, for only some of my projects, when I change the "rate type" for the resources assigned to the project, P6 assigns actual costs to the activities, even though I have shut off every instance I can find of the "Auto Compute Actuals" option, and I have shut off the "Recalculate Actual Units and Cost when duration % complete changes" option for the project.
I don't wish to have P6 auto-compute the actual costs, because I am manually typing in the actual costs based on data from the corporate accounting system: I put that data into activities that hold actual costs within a work element, but have no resources.
At the same time, in the projects that have the Auto Compute Actuals problem, I also find that I cannot make actual costs stick for materials. What I type in for Actual Labour and Actual Non-Labour will stay put, but P6 resets the Actual Materials to zero after changing the rate type.
It would appear that there is a connection between these two peculiar behaviours, but I am stumped as to what it is. Not all of my projects have this aberrant behaviour, but I cannot find the key difference between the well-behaved and ill-behaved projects.
Is there some setting that I'm missing, or some interaction between settings that I don't yet understand?
You might wonder why I am changing the rate type. It is because I need to do analysis in three sets of rates: direct costs, costs marked-up to cover overheads, costs marked-up to deliver profit.