By Allen Wyatt for Excel.Tips.Net

Rounding to the Nearest Quarter Hour

Lisa is trying to set up a timesheet. It needs to go by the seven-minute rule. If it is 7 minutes till the hour it rounds to, say, 8:00 am; if it is 10 till it rounds to 7:45. If it is 7 minutes after it would be 8:00, and 8 minutes after would be 8:15 am. In other words, whatever time is entered needs to be rounded to the nearest quarter hour.

The full name of the rule that Lisa mentions is the “7/8 minute rule.” It’s a throwback to when timecards were processed manually. Depending on the particular time clock, the rule may not have the same result as quarter-hour rounding. Consider that the 7/8 rule rounds down all the way to 7 minutes and 59.9 seconds whereas quarter-hour rounding rounds down only to 7 minutes and 29.9 seconds. It’s not a huge difference, but the 7/8 minute rule in a payroll context gives employers a 30 second freebie.

If Lisa is only entering hours and minutes, then quarter-hour rounding is just fine. This can be handled in a number of different ways. For instance, you could create a lookup table that shows what the rounded time would be for each time within the hour, and then—based on the number of minutes in the original time—use VLOOKUP (or one of the other lookup functions) to determine the correct minutes.

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