Non-Labor Cost Planning
Material, travel, ODC, and external services each planned through a purpose-built structure — with non-labor events that participate directly in the schedule network.
Non-labor costs in ProjectXL are planned explicitly rather than inferred from resource type. Material purchases, travel, ODC, and external services have meaningfully different cost structures — quantities and unit prices for material, trip counts and per-diem rates for travel, time windows and shared rates for facilities. Forcing all of those through a generic "resource" record is a category error that produces plans where the numbers are technically present but the structure does not reflect how the cost actually works.
Purpose-Built Domain Structures
Each non-labor cost domain has its own plan structure with fields that match how costs in that domain are estimated and approved. A material plan has quantities and unit prices. A travel plan has trip counts and cost-per-trip assumptions. This specificity is not cosmetic — it produces a plan where every input has a clear semantic meaning and any reviewer can understand exactly what was assumed without reverse-engineering the structure.
Non-Labor Events as Schedule Nodes
Non-labor events are the timing mechanism for non-labor costs. Each event defines when a cost occurs and places it in the project timeline. Because events participate in the schedule network directly, a material delivery can be a real predecessor to activities that depend on it — the dependency is part of the network, not a comment field or a manually maintained parallel spreadsheet.