In this walkthrough guide, you can learn to find the last working day of a given year in Google Sheets. It’s just a simple formula.
There are two approaches, and we will follow the shorter one.
The first approach is populating a list of dates from 21st to 31st December using SEQUENCE, filtering out weekends, and returning the max date.
In the other approach, we will use the WORKDAY or WORKDAY.INTL date functions. It’s the shorter one.
How do WORKDAY and WORKDAY.INTL functions differ in evaluating the last business day of a given year?
You can exclude holidays (other than weekends) by specifying them in WORKDAY.INTL.
Determining the Weekends (String Method)
Before proceeding further, you should know how to specify the weekend(s) to exclude while evaluating the last working day of the provided year.
There are two methods (codes): Number and String.
The easiest way to remember weekend code is to follow the string method, and here is an example.
There will be seven numbers as a string representing days from Monday to Sunday, where 0 and 1 represent work day and weekend, respectively.
String Method (Sat-Sun Weekends): "0000011"
The above string represents Saturday and Sunday weekends and which is the default one in the function. So you can omit it if your weekends are the same.
How do we specify Friday and Saturday as the weekend in the WORKDAY.INTL function?
String Method (Fri-Sat Weekends): "0000110"
If you understand the above, please proceed to the formula that finds the last business day of the year.
Last Working Day of a Given Year
I want to find the last working day of 2016 specified in cell B3.
To find the last business day, use the following formula. I haven’t specified the weekend string since they are the default ones.
=workday.intl(date(B3,12,31)+1,-1)
To specify Friday-Saturday as the weekend, you can use the following formula.
=workday.intl(date(B3,12,31)+1,-1,"0000110")How does this formula work?
With the help of the DATE function, we could generate the last date in 2016, which is 31/12/2016.
date(B3,12,31)We have added 1 to it to get the first day of the following year.
date(B3,12,31)+1The WORKDAY.INTL function counts backward because of the negative number to advance and returns the last working day of the given year.
Syntax: WORKDAY.INTL(start_date, num_days, [weekend], [holidays])
To specify holidays, if any, enter them in a cell or cell range and use that reference as the last parameter in the formula.
Last Working Day of the Current, Last, or Next Year in Google Sheets
If you understand the above formula, it’s easy to find the last working/business day of the current, previous, or next year in Google Sheets.
For that, you should replace B3 in the formula with either of the below codes.
Current Year: Replace B3 with year(today())
Last/Previous Year: Replace B3 with year(today())-1
Next Year: Replace B3 with year(today())+1
