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How to determine the age of a company from its start/end date

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Dereck_Hoekstra
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

I’m organizing a list of companies and trying to calculate how many years they’ve been in business.

Some companies are still open/in existence, and some businesses have closed/shut down.

Ideally I’d like to have 3 fields:

  1. Start Date: The year the company opened for business
  2. End Date: The year the company closed for business (if the business actually closed down)
  3. Age: How many years the company has existed either up to today OR to the “End Date” if there is a value placed in that field.

I’m trying to figure out how to write a formula that basically states the following:
Age = IF End Date is null (TODAY - Start Date), ELSE (End Date - Start Date).

I’d also like to figure out how to make all 3 of those fields on show “years” as appose to the whole date field (month/day/year). Any guidance is much appropriated!

4 Replies 4
Dereck_Hoekstra
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Figured it out, here’s the formula and example below:

“Started”: Year the company started - (number field)
“Ended”: Year the company closed - (number field)
“Age”: How many the years the company has existed - (formula field)

IF({Ended} = BLANK(), DATETIME_FORMAT(TODAY(),‘YYYY’)-{Started}, {Ended}-{Started}) & " yrs old"

RESULT
Company Age 2.jpg

Two notes:

  • You have YEAR() function to the get the year of a date (including NOW())
  • You also have DATETIME_DIFF() function to use instead of the math calculation.
  • Do the IF check inside the calculation so you don’t have to repeat the -{Started} part.

I’d do:

DATETIME_DIFF(Started,IF(Ended, Ended, NOW()), 'y') & ' yrs old'

Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll plug that in and give it a try!

I’ve done the formula without testing, but I hope it’s correct because it’s easy. If not, just recreate it.