I am in charge of Payroll for my employer. For Our setup Payroll is ran on the 15th and 30th of each month, unless one of those days fall on a weekend, if they do fall on a weekend, it is ran on the Friday before. I would like to set up a repeating project in Omnifocus for this, but I’m having trouble figuring out how to implement this in OmniFocus. I can repeat a project for a certain weekday in every month (1st, 2nd,3rd, last, ect.) but I can’t do the 30th with a check on whether or not it’s the last weekday. Am I out of the scope of OmniFocus in this? I can probably figure something out with shortcuts or automator, but I’d really like to implement the native Omnifocus repeat functionality if possible just for stability’s sake.
I feel like it’s not possible, but I haven’t done a super committed dive into the new repeat patterns in OF3.
Perhaps a combination of Deferred and Due dates - deferred until 28th of the month and due on 30th. The 28th would be the earlieat run date, if the 30th is on a Sunday. You could also add a “before due” notification of 2 days to get a reminder on 28th. The repeat would then just be monthly on the Assigned Date (or 30th). Not very elegant, but it would work.
I only use iOS, so I don’t know if there are any other options on the Mac version of OF3.
As you noted, another option is to create a Shortcut that submits a new task and run it each month.
You could also build a shortcut that would populate your OmniFocus with a year (or as many years’ worth) of entries as you wanted in one go. Run it once and add (non-repearing) entries with due dates for the next 20 years…!
Does the last weekday of the month, deferred to two days before that not work for you? Naturally the last weekday of the month could be the 31st, but with a defer date two days before and an alert on the defer date you should be fine
For the 15th I would defer until the 10th - this allows for long holiday weekends, if your country has those.
I imagine that might work. I was hoping to keep it due on the hard due date because I have several time sensitive tasks before that day. Really the only thing I do on the actual day is make sure all the direct deposits hit the bank. The work is really done 2 days before the day in question.
Honestly what you suggest will probably work. But I’d like to be a bit more granular on dates since I’m dealing with peoples paychecks (probably overkill I’m just extra paranoid about this part of my job.) I’m considering playing around with creating a calendar workflow in Automator to apply the template and do Date math and just manually declaring the 24 dates a year I need to run payroll
Tony, I saw your reply after I replied to rosemary. I just might to a shortcut that’s meant to be ran once a year that will do the templates for each payroll day. I think I’d rather do that with shortcuts since I’m comfortable working with it than with Automator.
@Chadlenberg After posting my reply, I started having a little play around with a Shortcut. This will ask you how many months you want to generate OF3 tasks for, starting with this month. I have only set it up for the 30th of the month and, as @RosemaryOrchard pointed out, it does not cater for holidays on any particular date.
This sample will create an OF3 task in the inbox for each month. Hope this helps.
