Hi all, I've lurked and found many answers on this site in the past, but now it's time to post.
This is less of an Excel question and more of a general math question. Here's the background -
At work we have employees who process our billing. They take completed work orders from the field, and process them into invoices that we send out to our customers for payment. They have a daily goal of clearing out their queue of work orders that are ready each morning to be invoiced. The goal is different each day, if that matters.
I am being asked to come up with a way to quantify how well they are actually doing toward this goal. I need to assign a percentage to each day's work, and then assign a percentage over a period of time (let's say a workweek). If the goal one day was to complete 222 invoices, and they completed 205, then they did 92.3% of their work that day. I run into a conundrum when I want to take an average of the workweek. I've attached a sample image of what I'm working with.
The question I am asking is - Do I want to take an average of all of the daily percentages? (Method A in the picture) Or.. should I take the percentage of an average of the daily numbers? (Method B in the picture)
In the attached image, you'll see that the two methods produce different results. Which method is mathematically "preferable?" This is probably something I learned as a teenager!
This is less of an Excel question and more of a general math question. Here's the background -
At work we have employees who process our billing. They take completed work orders from the field, and process them into invoices that we send out to our customers for payment. They have a daily goal of clearing out their queue of work orders that are ready each morning to be invoiced. The goal is different each day, if that matters.
I am being asked to come up with a way to quantify how well they are actually doing toward this goal. I need to assign a percentage to each day's work, and then assign a percentage over a period of time (let's say a workweek). If the goal one day was to complete 222 invoices, and they completed 205, then they did 92.3% of their work that day. I run into a conundrum when I want to take an average of the workweek. I've attached a sample image of what I'm working with.
The question I am asking is - Do I want to take an average of all of the daily percentages? (Method A in the picture) Or.. should I take the percentage of an average of the daily numbers? (Method B in the picture)
In the attached image, you'll see that the two methods produce different results. Which method is mathematically "preferable?" This is probably something I learned as a teenager!
