Project option to accumulate work hours on the work hours date vs Task creation date

I'd like to suggest an enhancement to Projects to roll up logged work hours based on the work hours date vs the task date.

As an example, we have monthly support contracts where we need to track the number of hours worked during a given month. The way we do this right now (unless someone can suggest a better way) is to create a Project with the Budget option set to Milestone hours. We then create Milestones for each month and enter the number of contracted hours for each month as the Milestone budget number.

Then as tasks are created and worked on within the milestone the budget numbers roll up as expected and we can use the Milestone budget threshold value to generate emails when getting close to the monthly budget.

All this works great, as long as the task being worked on is completed within the monthly Milestone. However, if a task cannot be completed within the month and rolls over to the next month, it appears the only way to ensure the work hours are allocated to the appropriate month is to clone the task from Month 1 to Month 2 then close the task in Month 1. The downside here is that you now have 2 different task numbers for what is the same task.

The cause of this issue is that work hours are rolled up based on the date the task was created, not when the work was done. So if a task was created in Month 1 but needed to have work continue into Month 2, even though the work hours are entered within the timeframe of Month 2, the budget hours are attributed to Month 1.

What would be great is to have an option when creating a project to enable work hours to accumulate based on the work hours date not the task date. That would allow a task to be created in Month 1 but still have work logged in Month 2 without the need to clone.

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