Create new buckets monthly with Month date

[vel2765]

Hello,

I am new to power automate. But I was wondering if there is a way to create a new bucket each month with the specific month as the title?

[trice602]

Hi @vel2765 ,

New bucket in what application, Planner?

[vel2765]

Sorry, yes in planner. 

[trice602]

Hi @vel2765 ,

Perfect.  Yes, so you can create a new bucket with a month name.  First you will use an expression and get the month name and then use create bucket action.

formatDateTime(body('Current_time'),'MMMM')

[vel2765]

Thank you so much! This may work. Can I set it up to automatically do it every month on the 30th of each month?

[trice602 · Accepted solution]

Hi @vel2765 ,

Ok, assuming you want this to run every month, you may want to add the YYYY to the bucket name since once you cycle through, you will get an error.  In this new flow, I use Get Future Time and add 2 days to it.  I am going to always run at 10:00 on the 30th so will always get the next month.

The month expression is: formatDateTime(body('Get_future_time'),'MMMM')

The year expression is: formatDateTime(body('Get_future_time'),'yyyy')

Next when I create the bucket, I use the output from both compose statements.  Please mark as a solution to help others find this answer too!

So when this runs again on October 30th at 10:00, it will create a new bucket named November2023.  

[vel2765]

Thank you! It worked!

[trice602]

Nice!  Have a great day over there! 

[vel2765]

Hello, for some reason this isn't working now.. any help?

[grantjenkins]

@vel2765 Can you explain what's not working now? Is the flow throwing an error, or something else?

Also, I just wanted to mention - you wanted it to run on the 30th of each Month - what about February which only has 28 (or 29 in a leap year) days.

[vel2765]

The name of the month is not showing up as the title. It is just either gibberish or date and time. I would like the name of the month as the title

Ah! That's true. I really need it to create on the last day of the month for the next month. Or even if it created it at 5 am on the 1st of each month that would be fine too. 

[grantjenkins]

So the name of the task would just be the month: January, February, etc.? Did you not want to show the Year too since it will span over multiple years over time? January 2023, February 2023, etc.?

[vel2765]

Yes that would be great!

[grantjenkins]

Below is how I'd go about building this flow.

See full flow below. I'll go into each of the actions.

Recurrence is set to run daily. However it will have a Trigger Condition to check if the current day is the last day of the month, and only run the flow if that condition is true. In essence, it will only run once a month on the last day of the month. The Trigger Condition expression is below. For the second part of the condition, it adds 1 month to the current month, then gets the start of that month (1st of next Month), then subtracts a day so you end up with the last day of the current month.

@equals(
    formatDateTime(utcNow(), 'yyyy-MM-dd'), 
    addDays(startOfMonth(addToTime(utcNow(), 1, 'Month')), -1, 'yyyy-MM-dd')
)

To set the Trigger Condition you will need to go into the Settings for the Recurrence trigger, add a new Trigger Condition, and paste the expression above into it.

Create a task will then create the task with the next Month using the following expression.

//If you want the Month and Year: January 2023
addToTime(utcNow(), 1, 'Month', 'MMMM yyyy')

//If you just want the Month: January
addToTime(utcNow(), 1, 'Month', 'MMMM')

[vel2765]

Thank you! That helps to solve another one I was trying to do!

But in this instance I was trying to name the buckets the months, not the tasks. So instead of creating a task, I could just use create a bucket in planner?

[grantjenkins]

In that case you can just use Create a bucket in place of Create a task and it should work just the same.

[vel2765]

@grantjenkins Thank you so much for all of your help! I appreciate it very much. However, everytime it runs this is the name of it. I am not sure how to get the name to show up.