FinanceTier 715 minintermediate
Days Sales Outstanding
Calculate how many days it took to collect each invoice, without breaking on the ones still unpaid.
What you will learn
- Subtract an invoice date from a payment date to get a day count
- Guard the calculation against a blank payment date for an unpaid invoice
- Explain why an unguarded formula produces a misleading result for unpaid invoices
Excel skills
Date subtraction, IF · Date and Time Functions
The task
Calculate how many days it took to collect each invoice. Some invoices haven't been paid yet, so their Payment Date is blank - the formula in C2 needs to leave those blank too, rather than showing a meaningless negative number.
You work in a real spreadsheet in your browser, and your answer is checked against hidden traps the moment you submit.