Formulas: WorkDay() and NetWorkingDays()
Category: Dates/Times
WorkDay()
Adds a specified number of workdays to a date
or stated otherwise...
Hey Coda, please add a certain number of days to this date, but automatically exclude weekends.
NetWorkingDays()
Tallies number of workdays between dates
said differently...
Hey Coda, tell me how many days are between these two dates, but exclude weekends.
These formulas each have three parameters. Two are shared and one is unique for each formula. First, the unique parameter.
WorkDay()
NumWorkingDays
Workday(StartDate, NumWorkingDays, Holidays)
Number of Mon-Fri days to add.
NetWorkingDays()
EndDate
NetWorkingDays(StartDate, EndDate, Holidays)
The date you want to count to.
Next are the two shared parameters.
StartDate
Workday(StartDate, NumWorkingDays, Holidays)
The date you want to start from.
Holidays
NetWorkingDays(StartDate, EndDate, Holidays)
Days you want to exclude.
Estimating Staff Capacity
Within a business, it’s critical to estimate your staff’s capacity and properly allocate staffing resources. WorkDay() and NetWorkingDays() help you do just that!
Notice the yellow and gray columns below.
Yellow Column: Measuring how many total days away the estimated completion of a task is. Gray Column: Measuring the number of actual workdays (excluding weekends and holidays) that will be allocated towards this task.
WorkDay() and NetWorkingDays() are very helpful for visualizing and planning the completion of tasks by more faithfully capturing the hours/days which people work.
Accounting for Holidays
Both formulas take an optional parameter for Holidays. Time after time, though, I see individuals plugging dates into this parameter in painful or laborious ways, or just not using this parameter at all!
Best practice around entering Holidays so your formulas work as designed is to create a distinct holidays table and reference that as a list in your formula. Here is the Holidays table that is being used as an input for the above tasks table. Click into the Workdays column or the Estimated Completion column in the table above to see how this table is referenced.
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