The price is right

Q: My Excel workbook calculates the cost of hundreds of manufactured inventory items. We want to create an Excel formula that will automatically set the sales price at three times cost, with the sales price ending in 99 cents. Further, these manufactured items are packaged nine to a box, and because our sales representatives in foreign countries frequently sell them individually, we would like all sales prices to be evenly divisible by nine (with no fractional pennies to make the math easier). Is there an Excel calculation that can do this for us?

A: Use Excel 2013’s new Ceiling.Math function to round your costs up to the nearest dollar amount evenly divisible by nine, and then add 99 cents, as suggested in the screen image below.

You can download this example Excel workbook at carltoncollins.com/math.xlsx.