Noodlesoft Forums

Hi --

After years of happy Hazel use, I'm creating my first set of new automation rules to streamline my home bookkeeping. In particular, I'd like to automatically collect PDF receipts and confirmations of various purchases, transactions, etc into a set of folders organized by year and month. The idea is to have a single "inbox" folder that I can drop files into, and then have Hazel notice them and move them to the right destination folder. For example, a PDF named

Code: Select all

2022-11-15 my receipt.pdf

would get moved to

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~/Documents/Our finances/2022/11

.

However, the "inbox" for this workflow is different than the parent folder for the destination ("Our finances" in the above example). The "inbox" lives in Dropbox, because I'd like to be able to drop files in there from various clients. However the archive for these financial (and other) statements and documents is notably not in Dropbox but in a regular folder on my main Mac.

I've built a similar workflow for photo/image processing, but it involves different steps: one set of rules on the starting folder that first notice the new files and moving them to a new location, then a second set of rules tied to the destination parent folder that sort them into subfolders. But I'm wondering: is it possible to do this under a single folder configuration? I'd love to just have a single folder configuration that matches the right files, and tells them to "Sort into subfolder" had an extra parameter which allowed you to indicate a new "parent" of the subfolder.

I suspect the answer is "no" given that Hazel seems to be fundamentally designed around folders as the core unit of automation, so since my folders sit under different roots, this has to be implemented as 2 separate configurations. But given the simplicity of the task, it would be great if "Sort into subfolder" could include an implicit "move" operation by specifying a different parent folder.

Any thoughts?

You can do it in one rule. Use a Move followed by a Sort into subfolder.

Thanks @Mr_Noodle. I'm having trouble getting this working as desired: the file arrives in the destination folder (the "Move" operation works) but the "Sort into subfolder" doesn't seem to. I've tested with test files and all the rule criteria match correctly.

Note that the destination has its own Folder rule set on it, but they are configured differently and don't match these new incoming files. So I assumed these would not get in the way. Might it still be interfering with the first set of folder rules, such that when a file is moved to a new folder, that folder's rules take over even if the original ruleset had additional steps to perform?

It's a bad idea to have two different sets of rules overlapping like that. Is there a reason why you can't move it to the one folder, then have the rules for that folder do Sort into subfolder?

Thanks that's helpful guidance. I think I can reconfigure things so that all the sorting into subfolders is handled by the parent folder.