calculate costs: duration X cost / hour = huh?

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gbwestoly Author

Level 1

7 points

calculate costs: duration X cost / hour = huh?

I use a the basic Numbers invoice for billing customers.

I have been entering my hours worked as a decimal value -- such as 1.5 meaning 1h 30m

I was trying to instead use hours and minutes, because some increments look better e.g 1h 50m vs 1.833333

However, the formula / cell setting ends up with a charge per day rather than per hour.

1hr 50m x $30 returns a value of $2.29

If I enter 1.833333 to display as duration, it shows 1d 19h 59m.

While I can use a workaround formula that multiples the result times 24, or continue to just calculate my hours as decimals, I'd like to know if there is a "correct" way to do this.

Thanks

Glen Buschmann

iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.1), Numbers 3.6.1

Posted on Feb 9, 2016 8:30 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

SGIII

Level 8

35,276 points

Feb 10, 2016 9:49 AM in response to gbwestoly

Try entering 1 hour 30 minutes as 1h30m in, say, cell A1. Numbers automatically knows that is a duration.

Then in your formula use =DUR2HOURS(A1) * 30.

SG

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Answer 2

gbwestoly Author

Level 1

7 points

Feb 10, 2016 10:23 AM in response to SGIII

Thanks for the reply. This time I entered "1h30m" into an empty cell, made no other changes (i.e. no DUR2HOURS in the formula, just a simple cell A1 * cell A2 = cell A3) and the results were correct (1h30m * 30 = 45). I can tell now that the miscalculation arose from trying to convert a decimal figure to "Duration" using Inspector / Format > Cell > Data Format pull-down menu. Next time I will just enter H & M into the empty cell rather than try to convert a decimal entry into duration format. If I had to redo a bunch of stuff (which I don't), DUR2HOURS would be good to know.

Again, thanks for the advice.

GB

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