Help to sort into sub folder by Financial years

I am a total newbie but having read David Sparky's Paperless book, I am trying to create some automatic filing rules for my financial documents.

Here in Australia the financial year is different from the calendar year and runs from 1 July to 30 June.

Thus when I file a receipt (such as a childcare receipt), I want to rename it, move to a folder called Childcare Receipts and then sort into subfolder BUT instead of the subfolder being just the calendar year, I want it to be a year as I've defined above.

If I simply sort receipts into calendar years, come tax time, half the receipts are in 1 subfolder and half in a 2nd subfolder.

Hmm, not sure of a good way to do this. Is the calendar year found in the name of the file? Otherwise, you may need to use a script to do this.

yes the calendar year and the month are both in the name of the files - each file has the naming convention: yyyy-mm-dd blah blah statement.xxx

Just by saying 'sort into subfolder' with pattern date created and defining this as the the year only would give you the sort by calendar year. Problem with the financial year is that you really want to specify a range for the subfolder - i.e. year 1-July to year 2-June

I have no scripting knowledge whatsoever :cry:

but perhaps I need to learn....

I have a couple of ideas on an AppleScript that could solve your problem. Not exactly sure yet, but give me a couple of days to put something together and I'll get back to you. Also if you could post exactly how you would want the folder structure to be, that would be helpful.

A functional but not elegant solution.

Documents to be sorted are in format yyyy-mm-dd - (whatever). Target Tax folder is named yyyy/yyyy eg 2012/2013 instead of 2012/13.

Create a rule to move required docs from their source to the 'Tax' folder.

Then create two rules to run on the 'Tax" folder; I call them first half year and second half year. The rule condition is to match name to year-month-anything with nested conditions of name contains (eg first half year) -01-, -02-, -03-, -04-, -05-, -06-. Same method for second half year.

Then sort to subfolder with pattern (first half) yyyy/yyyy(adj+1), and for the second half yyyy(adj-1)/yyyy.

D.

De-Man wrote:Create a rule to move required docs from their source to the 'Tax' folder.

Then create two rules to run on the 'Tax" folder; I call them first half year and second half year. The rule condition is to match name to year-month-anything with nested conditions of name contains (eg first half year) -01-, -02-, -03-, -04-, -05-, -06-. Same method for second half year.

Then sort to subfolder with pattern (first half) yyyy/yyyy(adj+1), and for the second half yyyy(adj-1)/yyyy.

Hey,
I'm having this exact same issue - trying to sort documents into Tax year folders "13/14", "14/15" etc. I can see how your rules might work, but am having trouble actually configuring what you're describing.

It'd be really helpful if you could show me exactly what rules you have set up, maybe post a screenshot or something of your Hazel ruleset? I'd really appreciate it!

Thanks a lot,
Olly

I figured it out - I hadn't come across "nested rulesets". Hold alt and click "+" to turn the "+" icon into a "..." and create a nested rule.

Also discovered the "Adjust Date" function, which allows you to do just that with a matched date. That's what was abbreviated to "adj+/- 1" above.