Redmine

We've got the scenario as described here:

#24521

At our company we have the following scenario:

• We have some projects where a customer orders e.g. 200 hours (a PO = purchase order, assigned to a project)
• we can spent those 200h on the customer's project and log the time on tickets
• after the 200h are spent, the customer needs to purchase another time contingent

What I do in the moment is abusing the milestones as follows:

• I add a milestone and add the contingent e.g. in the name of the milestone: m1: 200h
• I create tickets and assign them to this milestone
• I regularly need to check the milestone : settings -> milestone -> Spent time
• if the spent time approaches 200h...
  • the customer has to issue a new PO (let's assume the customer orders 150h)
  • I create a new milestone, e.g.: m2: 150h
  • I copy all open tickets which are assigned to the milestone m1 and assign the copies to m2
  • I close all of the original tickets (still assigned to the milestone m1) so nobody logs accidentally more time to the wrong milestone

This is pretty awkward.

So for us it would be great to have a feature where this can be accomplished with a dedicated functionality.
Ideally we'd get an alarm if the spent time on a PO is approached (maybe variable setting, e.g. 10 hours)

Proposal:

• a PO is assigned to a project
• a ticket can be related to several POs of the project
• one of the related POs has to be selected to be the active PO where the hours are booked
• if the set contingent of a PO is reached and a user tries to log time to a ticket where this PO is set as active PO, he gets an error message to use a new PO

Are there any approaches to deal with this problem in Redmine?

Thanks.