Business-day schedules

Finance teams rarely want reports landing on Saturday morning. This page covers how to build export templates that match your business calendar.

Skipping weekends

Outpost's preset cadences don't include "weekdays only" as a single option. The way to achieve it is to create five weekly templates instead, one each for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, all pointing at the same saved search and destination.

1. Create the first template as Weekly on Monday at your chosen time
2. From the templates list, click Duplicate on that template four times
3. Edit each duplicate to use Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday

Slightly more clicks at setup, but the result is a single saved search delivered every business day to a single destination. The Job history page treats them as five separate templates, which is useful: you can see at a glance whether Monday's run succeeded independently of Tuesday's.

Last business day of the month

Use the monthly cadence with by position selected. Choose Lastand the day-of-week. For example:

• Last Friday. Runs on the last Friday of every month.
• Last weekday. Not directly supported. Use Last Friday and accept that the run lands a few days before month-end in months where the last calendar day is Sat/Sun.

If "last business day" means "the last weekday regardless of which weekday it is" (so the template lands on Monday March 31 in a month where the 31st is a Monday, but on Friday March 28 in a month where the 31st is a Sunday), Outpost doesn't have a single preset for this. The closest workaround:

1. Schedule the template as Monthly by day-of-month, set to day 31
2. Outpost will run it on the last calendar day of the month (the 31st where it exists, the 30th in April, the 28th or 29th in February)
3. Accept that in months where the last calendar day falls on a weekend, the run lands on Saturday or Sunday

For most finance use cases this is fine. The file is sitting in SharePoint when the team arrives Monday morning. If you genuinely need it on the last weekday, contact us. This is on the list of preset cadences we're considering.

Holiday handling

Outpost doesn't have a holiday calendar. A weekly template scheduled for Monday will still run on a Monday that happens to be a statutory holiday. The file lands in your destination, nobody is around to look at it, and it sits there until Tuesday.

For most teams this is acceptable. The holiday file isn't wrong, it's just early. The two cases where it matters:

• Downstream notifications. If a holiday template triggers an email or Teams alert that pulls people in on a day off, suppress the notification on the consuming side rather than trying to suppress the template in Outpost.
• Holiday-sensitive data. If the saved search returns wildly different numbers on a non-business day (cash position, for example, when no transactions are posting), and the report's audience would be confused by the dip, pause the template manually before known holidays and resume it after.

Worked example: weekly AR aging that respects holidays

Goal: Monday morning AR aging report in SharePoint, except when Monday is a stat holiday, in which case Tuesday morning is fine.

The honest answer: Outpost can't do this in one template. Two options that get close:

1. Live with Monday-only. Schedule weekly on Monday at 6:00 AM. Holiday Mondays produce a file that nobody reads. Your team picks up the report on Tuesday from the same Monday file. For most AR aging this is fine.
2. Manually pause around known holidays. A few days before a known long weekend, set the template to Paused. The Tuesday after, set it back to Active and click Run now. More discipline, but it gives you exactly the schedule you want.

Whichever you pick, write it down in your finance ops runbook so it survives personnel changes.