The Ultimate Guide to Rounding Time in Excel

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🎯 In this Excel roundup demonstration you will learn how to use ROUNDUP formula to round time in Excel….and allow 5 minutes before roundup time and roundup to half hours.
👨🏫 On-Screen Tutor Version: »»    • How To Round Time In Excel: CEILING.MATH a...  

In this ROUNDUP Excel formula example you will also learn how to round time in Excel with the CEILING.MATH function in Excel. The CEILING.MATH formula in Excel works in a similar way to ROUNDUP in Excel, so once you learn how to use ROUNDUP formula in Excel the Excel CEILING.MATH formula will be easy to master… Plus it is a more simple way to get Excel to round time to nearest half hour. You will see how to round off time in Excel and make Excel allow 5 min roundup with minimum, round time with tolerance, and roundup with offset. Watch this to get Excel ROUNDUP explained and round time in Excel with CEILING.MATH.

Say we're running a company and we're billing people by the half-hour. If somebody takes 45 minutes of our time we want to bill them for a whole hour, and if we only take 25 minutes that's half an hour etc. We're always rounding up the amount of time taken to the nearest half an hour.

I'll also show you how you can build in a bit of a tolerance because if you do 32 minutes work for somebody do you really want to build them for an hour because they've encroached into that next half an hour? Probably not.

If we were to use standard rounding on say 2hr 8min we'd be rounding that down to two hours, but actually you want to bill them two and a half. We're going to need to be using some kind of rounding up and yes, there is a formula in Excel called ROUNDUP, and that's exactly what we're going to use in this example.

In order to use ROUNDUP we need to know a bit about how Excel stores times because that makes this process slightly unique. Time in Excel is stored as a number and the number is a decimal fraction of 24 hours so 24 hours is the number one. In order to round to the nearest half an hour we are going to need to know how many half hours are in a day. There's 24 hours in a day so that's 48 half hours in a day, so we need to round to the nearest 48th of a day.

We will type in the formula ROUNDUP and choose the number we want to round up… which is the time. Unusually, we're going to times the time by 48 and then round it to zero decimal places, (because to round to the nearest 48th of a decimal place is exceptionally difficult and can't be done with the ROUNDUP formula). After we've rounded it we divide it back down by 48 and we've basically achieved a rounding to the 48 of an hour, which is half an hour.

I will show you how to build in some tolerance to this now. For example, there is a customer who we spent 6 hours and 2 minutes on her work and I think it would be very unfair to charge her for six and a half hours. We need to be giving her that 2 minutes free that day. Let's just say we want it to build in five minutes tolerance on this, so that if we go up to 5 min over, we round down, otherwise we round up. The first thing we need to do is work out what five minutes is as a proportion of a day and then adjust for that. There's 12 lots of five minutes in an hour and there's 24 hours in a day so there are 288 lots of five minutes in a day. If we divide one by 288 that gives us our number that we want to adjust for. Instead of applying the formula to the original time, we deduct this tolerance from it before the calculation.

Now that you’ve learned how to round time in Excel using the ROUNDUP formula and how to add a tolerance factor, you’re equipped with the tools to improve your time management and billing processes. These techniques are not just useful for simple time calculations—they can be applied to a wide range of professional and personal projects where accurate time tracking is crucial. Whether you're billing clients, tracking hours for a team, or simply organizing time-sensitive tasks, you can now ensure that all your time-based calculations are rounded correctly and fairly.

If you’ve found this tutorial helpful, there’s much more to explore within Excel. From advanced formulas to time-saving shortcuts, mastering Excel will enable you to handle even the most complex tasks with efficiency and ease. Don’t forget to hit the subscribe button and enable notifications so you never miss out on more Excel tips and tutorials that will help you save time, avoid mistakes, and boost your productivity. Keep refining your skills and use these practical, results-driven techniques to make your work smarter and faster.

Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you in the next video with even more tips to take your Excel abilities to the next level!