Monitoring x hours/month support contracts

We have several support contracts ("projects") that allow for a certain number of hours support work per month. Sometime these hours are fixed, but sometimes we need to increase or reduce available hours ad hoc.

I need a way to monitor the number of hours spent in a given month, against the available hours. or, better yet, a way to alert staff when they are nearing or have exceeded the available hours for the month.

Cheers
James

There are a few options on this front. We have a similar relationship with one of our clients and I have a saved report (project activity report by task) that I check weekly to see how things are coming in. This is a manual effort, but you can modify the budget and budget alert on the project profile page monthly. Depending on how your projects progress it could be a bit laborious, but if you just need to set an email alert to keep the project in check monthly you could do something like alert when you reach 75% of the monthly budget, then reset it each month. We use the project budget alert in 1/3 increments pretty often for our projects...alert me when the project is 1/3 of the way in, then reset the alert to 2/3, etc.