Determining Contract Weeks

Nicole needs to count the number of weeks worked on a contract. The contract start date (cell A1) would be November 15, which should appear in cell C1 as week one. So, when November 22 rolls around, it would be week two. When a contract completion date is entered in cell B1, then cell C1 should reflect the number of weeks between A1 and B1, rounded up as indicated. Nicole wonders if there is a function or formula that will help her determine the correct number of contract weeks.

There are any number of formulas you could use to determine your contract weeks. Any formula you use, however, should check cell B1, and if it is blank (meaning that the contract has not ended), then you could simply do your calculation based on today's date. Here is a formula that does the check and will return the proper contract weeks:

=IF(ISBLANK(B1),ROUNDUP((TODAY()-A1)/7,0),ROUNDUP((B1-A1)/7,0))

The formula could be shortened if you placed the IF function within the ROUNDUP function, in this manner:

=ROUNDUP((IF(ISBLANK(B1),TODAY(),B1)-A1)/7,0)

Of course, if you wanted to not use today's date in your calculations, but instead indicate that the contract is still open, you could go back to this variation of the first formula:

=IF(ISBLANK(B1),"Contract Open",ROUNDUP((B1-A1)/7,0))

All of these example formulas, so far, may not handle the one-week boundary properly. For instance, if the contract start is November 15 and the contract end is November 22, then the formulas return 1. However, you may want it to return 2, meaning that since the contract ended on November 22, then it should always consider that day a second week. If that is the case, then you simply need to add 1 to any of the formulas, as shown here:

=ROUNDUP((IF(ISBLANK(B1),TODAY(),B1)-A1+1)/7,0)

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