my department at work has a monthly budget for drinks and snacks. a few days each month, another department uses our space and our supplies. how do i calculate what to charge them for the drinks and snacks they use, factoring in that they only use that space for a limited amount of days and their department is a smaller amount of people (both those figures are known quantities) many thanks
Asked
Active
Viewed 300 times
0
-
Why the downvotes? This would be a poor question from an algebra student but its a really good one from someone outside the community who needs a little bit of elementary mathematics. – Ethan Bolker Feb 21 '18 at 13:22
1 Answers
0
You want to count person-days.
Suppose your department has $18$ people and uses the space $25$ days while the guest department has has $10$ people and uses the space $5$ days. that's $$ 18 \times 25 + 10 \times 5 = 500 \text{ person-days} $$ worth of refreshments, assuming everyone consumes about the same amount.
Their share is $$ \frac{50}{500} = 0.10 = 10\% $$ of the cost.
(I imagined numbers to make the arithmetic easy.)
Ethan Bolker
- 95,224
- 7
- 108
- 199
-
excellent thank you! i was on the right path but just couldn't get there. much appreciated x – Madeleine Drake Feb 21 '18 at 13:09