Duplicating a sheet each month based on the previous month.

Vandalist

Hi everyone, I may be too deep in this to think clearly…

We have a basic task and time-tracking sheet that relies on the previous months' time logs to stay accurate. For example, our client might have 20 support hours available with us, they use 18 in January, so in February, they start with 22 (the unused hours carry over). So the February sheet relies on reading the January sheet. We have this set up via functions, and it works okay. The issue is that every month, we need to manually create a new sheet for the month. This is not terribly efficient.

Any suggestions for how this could be handled better? I looked into Zapier, but it can't clone the "latest" month, only a statically chosen month.

Thanks team.

Kerry St. Thomas

Is there a reason you need to separate the sheets? What I mean - instead of multiple sheets denoting "January 2025" and "February 2025"… could you have a column that identifies the month? Row capacity is fairly considerable (I cannot recall if it's still 20,000 rows or if the capacity has been increased to 50,000 - but I do recall hearing that it has been increased), so I wonder if you can leverage that as a more scalable. You can either keep all the data on one sheet, or separate into a "this month" and "prior months" sheets… using Move Row Automation to push rows to the archive when a month rolls over.

Alternately, if you MUST separate things to individual sheets, perhaps you can start with input onto a "staging" sheet - and then leverage Move Row automations to push to existing "month" sheets based on the created date or some other criterion. This way, you're doing the manual work on the back end (where only ARCHIVING is the manual aspect), instead of at the beginning of the data flow (meaning the new sheet would change URL and name and all the rest).

Hopefully some of this is usable for you, or sparks some ideas for something that will be. Good luck!

Vandalist

Hey Kerry,

If we don't break this up into separate sheets, it becomes less user-friendly for the customer to try and review their "support hours".

I see what you are saying but I don't think it will work for what we need. In saying that, what your answer does tell me is that the solution for what we need is likely going to require some fairly heavy development, or, that our way of setting this up in the first place needs to be completely revisited.

So, it's not quite a home run, Kerry, but you have given me the change of mindset to reassess my swing!

Thank you.