I am trying to manage the patches in our environment with Desktop Central. I thought after reading the documentation, I understood it, but apparently, i don't. 

Last month I created a test group in which to test patches on. The test and approve was created so after 5 days, the patches were automatically approved. 

I then created 3 groups for automated deployment. Production and 2 sub groups based on different time frames.  

Everything seemed to have gone well. We hit an 80% success rate in patching for Jan. But now that i'm ready to do Feb, everything doesn't seem to flow like last month or in the documentation.

I downloaded Feb's patches and pushed them to the test group manually. There are 62 patches for the test group. There are 20 machines in the test group, all machines patched. 

I went in to my automated deployment for Jan, thinking I could just change the expiry time frames, since nothing else changes, but it doesn't list any patches for this month. It also lists patches going back to Oct/Nov of last year.  So apparently, i pushed patches other than just Jan?

Since I don't seem to be able to adjust the automated production deployment from last month, I created  a new deployment for Feb. it has the same settings, same policies, etc. The only difference is the Expiry date.  However, when i look at the patch view, now there are 139 patches listed, going back to October of last year and only 37 patches from the month of Feb this year, not the 62 that were downloaded and tested. 

How does one create an automated deployment that pushes ONLY the current months patches that have been downloaded, tested and approved an no other patches to that particular deployment group?

Any patch that is available prior to the current month will be pushed out in a custom "back log" patch group manually. Or is it only possible to push the current months patches ONLY via a manual deployment?

Basically, my job is to keep the patches current and catch the entire organization up of back patches that are missing. 

The simplest way to do this, i thought, was to push out monthly patches each month with one automated deployment group. Then create a set of groups for missing patches.