MS Project 2013 - finding solution

Question

We are a company wishing to use Ms Project 2013 to help us in the management of our projects, and we prepared the purchase of the product by a 3-days training to learn the basics of the software.
Most of the functions looked really helpful for us to do our cost control and monitoring activities, except for the point that we could NOT arrange the working hours properly, forbidding us to use those functions.
Our company has two different working times depending on the weeks:
One week, we work from Monday to Friday, with the following working hours: 7:30am – 5:30pm -> Total: 45 hours
The second week we work from Monday to Saturday, with the following working hours: 7:30am – 5:00pm -> Total: 51 hours
The only way we found to have the proper calendar was to:
Set the default week from Monday to Saturday from 7:30am to 5:00pm
Create a recurrent exception week from Monday to Friday, which occurs once every 2 weeks (for, like, 5 years to be sure) from 7:30am to 5:30pm
Create a recurrent exception with the Saturday off which occurs once every two weeks
The problem is, the weekly working hours is still fixed at 40hours/week. This value can be changed, but will stay the same all the time (while we need it to change from one week to another)
Thus, all the costing, resources and planning calculations are biased by the fact that the software always count the weekly hours. It creates incoherent values on the number of days worked and resources use. For example, 1 day worked will count as
8 hours, regardless the fact that the day worked is 8.5 or 9 hours as per the calendar. We can see it with the fact that if we allow a resource at 1$/hour, one day worked will be 8$, regardless the day.
Those functionalities are the main reason why we would like to use MS Project, and for the moment, the only useful part of the software we have is a proper Gantt diagram due to this Weekly Hours problem. As we were about to purchase the product,
we need to know if there is any way to have the software work properly with our working time before doing so.
Thus, please, would it be possible to know:
If there is any way to fix the problem easily so our teams can use the software ?
If yes, could you please provide us instructions to create a proper calendar, so we can try it on our trial version ?
Thank you for your help and support,
With the hope that we could use your software for the development of our company.

Answer 1

Hien,
Let me expand a bit on Jan's right-to-the-point answer. Project has always had the limitation of a single definition for "hours per day", "hours per week", and "days per month", thus it is more challenging to set up a schedule
with a varied work week such as the 9-80 sequence (9 days with a total of 80 hours). There are basically two ways to handle a varied work week. The first is to simply create the schedule as a normal 40 work week and not try to emulate the varied work week.
This is the approach we took at the company where I worked a 9-80 schedule. In the long run this approach works quite well. The second approach is to enter all time related data in hours as Jan suggests. This may require some adjustment in thinking as some
companies like to plan in terms of days, weeks or even months. If data is required in those units, there are a couple of choices, either some VBA can be used to generate the needed data and dump it into extra fields or the Project data can be exported to another
application (e.g. Excel) where it can be reformatted as needed.
And just for reference, I note you use the term "your software" which implies you believe you are attempting to communicate with someone from Microsoft. That is not the case. Those of us who respond on this forum are strictly volunteers. We do
not work for nor do we have any direct ties to Microsoft.
Hope this helps.
John