Creating a Daily Counter Readout from a Total Lifetime Counter Sensor

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to create a daily click counter in Home Assistant using my sensor.whatpulse_clicks_sensor, which tracks lifetime clicks. My goal is to:

1. Track daily clicks by subtracting the previous day’s total from the current total.
2. Store the total clicks at midnight so that I can use it for calculations the next day.
3. Have the daily clicks update dynamically without breaking on restart.

Attempts So Far:

I first tried using an input_number helper (input_number.whatpulse_total_clicks_thru_yday) to store the midnight value and an automation to update it at midnight:

- alias: "Store WhatPulse Clicks at Midnight"
  id: store_whatpulse_clicks_midnight
  trigger:
    - platform: time
      at: "00:00:00"
  action:
    - service: input_number.set_value
      target:
        entity_id: input_number.whatpulse_total_clicks_thru_yday
      data:
        value: "{{ states('sensor.whatpulse_clicks_sensor') | int }}"
  mode: single

Then, I tried creating a template sensor to calculate daily clicks:

template:
  - sensor:
      - name: "WhatPulse Clicks Today"
        unique_id: whatpulse_clicks_today
        state: "{{ states('sensor.whatpulse_clicks_sensor') | int - states('input_number.whatpulse_total_clicks_thru_yday') | int }}"
        unit_of_measurement: "clicks"

Problems Encountered:

1. “Message malformed: value should be a string for dictionary value” – When trying to save automations in the UI.
2. Math on input_number not working – Home Assistant doesn’t seem to allow direct math operations on input_number helpers in template sensors – is this true? Maybe my code is wrong.
3. Tried converting input_number to a sensor, but then got "extra keys not allowed @ data['0']" when saving the config.
4. Even when it saves, the template sensors show as “unavailable” on my dashboard.

I’ve seen some solutions suggesting template sensors instead of input_number, but I can’t get things to persist across reboots.

Has anyone successfully created a daily counter like this? Any guidance would be appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

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