Managing ongoing work

I'm really struggling to find a managable way to handling ongoing work. For example we do ongoing optimisation work for people. This involves some regular monthly jobs that are common across projects plus ongoing work some of which is common and some isn't.

I have tried to set this up as follows:
* created a client to hold my "template" projects.
* create a project for "type A seo contract".
* Create 3 milestones (Account set-up, technical set-up, End of Month 1).
* Add tasks to each of those milestones for all the recurring issues
* Add tasks outside the milestones for the ongoing issues

This looked like a genius solution to me. My plan had been to copy this project for each client using that package, tweak the monthly milestone to suit them then copy that 11 times. Perfect.

However doing that absolutely floods the task list. I had thought milestones would be sequential and tasks in later ones wouldn't show until the previous milestone due date was reached. I couldn't see a sensible way to make the tasks lists manageable like this, so had to re-think.

My next idea was to copy the monthly milestone at the end of each month. again, seemed sensible. However the status of each task is copied as well - so we would have to go in a update each of these (incidentally this behaviour doesn't seem correct). It was also a pain as anything added to that milestone as a one off would be copied.

Next option was to only have the current milestone in place, but also have a "dummy" one. We could copy the dummy each month rather than the previous month's milestone. this would solve the status issue and ensure we were using an unspoilt copy. Problem here is that the dummy shows in task lists etc even if marked as complete.

The only option I can see remaining is to export the milestone and import them each month. This seems like overkill.

Am i being daft? This seems like a fairly straight forward request. I am deperate to find a way around this as we've come across intervals at the end of a very long search.

Help!

Template projects can currently be done by copying a project. Project templates can be setup and then copied whenever that type of project is needed. To remove it from the task listing the project template can be set to inactive as inactive projects can still be copied and they don't count against your active total.