Rounding time to nearest minute or quarter hour etc. [formulas]

Share

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

The other day, I was building a spreadsheet to calculate FTE (full time equivalent) for staff based on hours worked on various days in a fortnight. While building the spreadsheet, I came across an interesting problem. Rounding Time to nearest minute.  We can’t use ROUND() or MROUND() to round time as these formulas aren’t designed to work with time values. Although time values are technically decimal, rounding time to nearest minute (or quarter hour etc.) can be tricky when usual round formulas. Let me share a few formulas to round time to nearest point.

round-time-in-excel

Let’s say you have a time value (either user input or calculated) in cell A1.

Use below formulas to round time in A1.

Nearest second: =TIME(HOUR(A1), MINUTE(A1), SECOND(A1)).

  • SECOND formula rounds up any fractions and returns full seconds.

Nearest 15 seconds: =TIME(HOUR(A1), MINUTE(A1), MROUND(SECOND(A1),15))

  • Use MROUND() to round up seconds values to nearest multiple of 15 (or whatever else)

Nearest Minute: =TIME(HOUR(A1), MINUTE(A1)+(SECOND(A1)>30),0)

  • The seconds value will always be zero. We just look at fractional minutes portion to see if they are more then 30 to round up to next minute. The trick is to add up Boolean check (SECOND(A1)>30) to minutes value.

Nearest 15 minutes: =TIME(HOUR(A1), MROUND(MINUTE(A1)+SECOND(A1)/60,15),0)

  • This one uses MROUND to round total mins (including fraction) to nearest multiple of 15.

Nearest 37th minute: =TIME(HOUR(A1), MROUND(MINUTE(A1)+SECOND(A1)/60,37),0)

  • Same logic. Just to show you how to round to an arbitrary minute.

Nearest hour: =TIME(HOUR(A1) +((MINUTE(A1)+SECOND(A1)/60)>30),0,0)

  • Check if total minutes is greater than 30 and add the result to hours.

Time for some home work

Let’s test your timing skills. Assuming A1 has date & time value (like 26-Jun-2017 7:21:32 AM), round it up to nearest working hour.

  • The working hours are 9AM to 6PM on weekdays (Monday – Friday)

Post your answers in the comments section. Tick tock, tick tock… time is ticking, post your answers.

Time to polish your skills

Always having a hard time working with times in Excel? Its high time you took some time to learn about Excel time.

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Share this tip with your colleagues

Excel and Power BI tips - Chandoo.org Newsletter

Get FREE Excel + Power BI Tips

Simple, fun and useful emails, once per week.

Learn & be awesome.

Welcome to Chandoo.org

Thank you so much for visiting. My aim is to make you awesome in Excel & Power BI. I do this by sharing videos, tips, examples and downloads on this website. There are more than 1,000 pages with all things Excel, Power BI, Dashboards & VBA here. Go ahead and spend few minutes to be AWESOME.

Read my storyFREE Excel tips book

Overall I learned a lot and I thought you did a great job of explaining how to do things. This will definitely elevate my reporting in the future.
Rebekah S
Reporting Analyst
Excel formula list - 100+ examples and howto guide for you

From simple to complex, there is a formula for every occasion. Check out the list now.

Calendars, invoices, trackers and much more. All free, fun and fantastic.

Advanced Pivot Table tricks

Power Query, Data model, DAX, Filters, Slicers, Conditional formats and beautiful charts. It's all here.

Still on fence about Power BI? In this getting started guide, learn what is Power BI, how to get it and how to create your first report from scratch.

19 Responses to “Free Invoice Template using Excel – Download”

  1. Doug H says:

    Nice post! Invoicing for the small biz or solo entrepreneur is something I see a lot of interest in. Also there are great templates from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates

  2. Abhay says:

    This is awesome.

    I would need a little more. e.g. say I generate a Inv. # 1 with all the details. Once done I can click a button all the relevant details gets stored in some table. Further, when i generate a new invoice those details gets stored in same table but just below the previous invoice.

    Is their a way to do this?

  3. Hui... says:

    Daily dose of Excel held a competition in 2005 for this same topic
    It obtained 9 solutions which are shown:
    http://dailydoseofexcel.com/archives/2005/10/27/invoice-app-the-results/

  4. parimal says:

    How can i removed Dollar Sign, As want to use this in india.
    Please reply.

  5. parimal says:

    Also if possible then can i use Indian Rupee Sign and how?

  6. Gaurang Mhatre says:

    Hi Chandoo,

    Thanks for sharing this invoice template, Let me tell you this template will definitely help me since I got a process to handle where this invoice piece comes. Just a small doubt, can we store all the invoice details in PRODUCT & SERVICES sheet. So that whenever I select an invoice number from invoice sheet I can take print out and I can share it as well. Can we do that?? Since I will be dealing with this on monthly basis.
    It would be great if you can help me with this.

    Thanks in advance for your help!

    Regards,
    Gaurang Mhatre

  7. shrikant says:

    Hi Chandoo,

    I was thinking learning excel is quite tuff task but your blog proved me wrong. You made it very interesting. Thank you. Also the template you have provided for Invoice is very helpful to us.

  8. AKIN KARAMAN says:

    Thanks thanks thanks.. Very helpful. 🙂

  9. Trevor Gordon says:

    Hi i love the speadsheet but would like to ask how do i get it to add the description into the invoice as well

  10. Anuj says:

    Hi Randy, I tried to download one of your link "https://www.dropbox.com/s/2yvo0o2tgq9quhe/Medical_Massage_and_Salon_Application-Free.xlsm" However, i found the link unavailable. Can you please help me get the new link or can you please send this VBA file on my Email-ID.

  11. Kapil says:

    Hi, is there any chance that this can work with the "Products & Service" sheet outside of the Invoice sheet. I create multiple invoice files for the numerous clients. Updating the product sheet for each of them maybe a task. Hence, I want to create a MASTER FILE from which data can be picked up without having to insert new data in each of the invoice files.
    Possible? Or am I asking for the moon 😉

  12. Kadr Leyn says:

    Thank you so much for tutorial.
    This example can be reviewed for the example of the advanced invoice that made with excel userform :https://youtu.be/Qr-4of-38DI

  13. Trevor Gordon says:

    Good Day
    i love this template may i ask if it could be modified to have the following
    when you lookup a item code in the next column to the right it brings up the description then the quantity, unit cost, discount and then total otherwise i love the template

    Item Code Description Quantity Unit Cost Discount Total

  14. Denise Konopka says:

    When creating an Invoice template in Excel are you able to utilize the auto row height and wrap feature when the cell is a merged cell? I need to have a number of cells merged together to allow for enough space to type in the description of work performed (lets say cells A-D are merged in each row) however it seems that I am unable to utilize the auto format feature. To work around this I have to manually increase the row height after each entry. Is there a better solution for this? Thank you!

Leave a Reply