How do you extend Redmine beyond its defaults to support project tracking, time logging, and reporting the way your company actually works?
Azati built and continuously maintains a custom Ruby on Rails plugin for Redmine that extends the platform's default functionality to support centralized project management, employee time tracking, department-level reporting, leave management, and automated logging reminders across a 350+ person software engineering company.
employees using the custom Redmine instance daily for project and time tracking
active development and maintenance with rolling feature additions and Redmine upgrades
centralized platform replacing fragmented project tracking and reporting across all internal teams
Off-the-shelf Redmine is built for the general case. A software engineering company with 350+ people, juggling internal R&D and client delivery simultaneously, is not the general case. The default reporting is project-centric when you need it to be team-centric. There are no automated nudges for missing time entries. Leave is tracked somewhere else entirely. The interface looks like a tool from 2010.
Rather than bolt on a collection of third-party plugins that half-solve each problem and break on every Redmine upgrade, Azati built one coherent plugin that owns the full surface: reporting, reminders, leave, and the visual layer. It has been in continuous production use and development since.
Standard Redmine reports are project-centric. A software company needs to see time allocation, workload, and project coverage across departments, teams, and individual employees simultaneously, a view standard Redmine doesn't provide:
Getting 350+ engineers to consistently log time without manual chasing is an operational challenge. Standard Redmine has no automated reminder mechanism for missing time entries:
Leave tracking and project management are two separate concerns in most companies, but they need to be connected: a developer on leave shouldn't be showing as available in project capacity views:
Running a custom plugin on top of Redmine means every Redmine version upgrade requires validating and updating the plugin against the new version's API and dependencies:
A custom Redmine plugin hooks into the framework's models, controllers, and views. It follows Rails conventions, uses ActiveRecord, and breaks in the same ways Rails apps break. Teams that treat Redmine customization as a click-through exercise hit the ceiling quickly. The work here required genuine Ruby on Rails depth, not Redmine familiarity alone.
This plugin runs Azati's own operations. A confusing report view, a misfiring reminder, a broken upgrade, all of these have real consequences for real colleagues. That accountability produces a different kind of care than building for a client you'll hand off to in three months.
Building the first version of a Redmine feature is straightforward. Keeping it working across Redmine upgrades, extending it without breaking what exists, and maintaining test coverage that makes future changes safe, that's where expertise accumulates. This is also what the separate Redmine client engagement covers: plugin development, upgrade, and DevOps for an external team.
Docker deployment, PostgreSQL, Redis for background jobs, SSL and SSH, the production environment is managed as part of the same engagement. A plugin that works in development and breaks in production is not a finished plugin.
Custom plugins, reporting extensions, time tracking workflows, theme customization, version upgrades, Azati has built and maintained all of this on a production Redmine instance used by 350+ people. Let's talk about what you need.
Customize my RedmineThe plugin extends Redmine across four core areas, each addressing a gap in standard Redmine functionality that a software engineering company running both internal and client projects needs to fill.
The reporting module provides management with structured views across the organization that standard Redmine's project-centric reports don't offer. Reports can be filtered and grouped by department, team, and individual employee, giving project managers and leadership the capacity and workload visibility they need without manual data aggregation.
Background jobs check for employees with unlogged time and send automated reminders, reducing the manual chasing that project managers previously had to do. The reminder logic accounts for leave days and non-working periods, so it doesn't generate noise on days when time logging isn't expected.
The leave management module tracks employee leave within the same platform used for project and time management, so capacity views and time logging expectations stay accurate. Leave records integrate with the time tracking and reporting modules so that availability data is consistent across the platform.
A custom branded theme replaces the Redmine default interface with Azati's own styling, making the platform feel like an internal product rather than a generic open-source tool. The theme has been maintained and updated alongside Redmine version upgrades to stay compatible.
| Area | What the team does |
|---|---|
| Reporting | Enhanced department, group, and employee-level reporting views |
| Time logging | Automated reminders for unlogged time with leave-aware logic |
| Leave management | Employee leave tracking integrated with capacity and time data |
| Theme | Custom Azati-branded Redmine interface |
| Upgrades | Redmine version upgrades and dependency updates |
| Test coverage | Ongoing test coverage improvements for safe plugin updates |
| Bug fixes | Ongoing bug fixing and stability improvements |
| Infrastructure | Docker deployment, PostgreSQL, Redis, SSL/SSH on Hetzner |
The plugin is maintained as an internal project at Azati. Rather than a dedicated full-time team, engineers contribute features, fixes, and improvements as capacity allows, a model that works for internal tooling where urgency is manageable and the codebase is well-understood across the team.
Keeping the plugin compatible with new Redmine versions is a recurring responsibility alongside feature work:
Internal projects, client projects, time entries, leaves, all in one system with one login. The alternative was a spreadsheet for leaves here, a different tracker for internal work there, and Redmine only for client projects. Consolidation sounds unglamorous but it removes daily friction at scale.
Automated reminders handle the follow-up that project managers used to do manually. The reminder logic knows about leave days, so it doesn't fire when it shouldn't. Less noise, more signal.
Cross-project workload visibility by department and team without exporting to a spreadsheet first. Leadership gets the view they need without an analyst in the middle.
Test coverage and regular Redmine upgrades mean the plugin stays current. Internal tools have a tendency to calcify. This one doesn't.
What this engagement demonstrates:
The reminders, the reporting aggregations, the leave integration, none of these were achievable through Redmine's admin UI. They required hooks into the framework's job infrastructure, model layer, and view system. If you can build this, you can build almost any Ruby on Rails customization a company might need.
The first version of a feature is easy to find a contractor for. Someone who has kept that feature working through three Redmine major versions, a dependency upgrade cycle, and two rounds of requirements changes is much harder to find. That's what ongoing internal tooling produces.
Azati runs on this plugin. There is no buffer between the people who built it and the people who use it. That proximity is worth more than most quality processes.
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