Counting financial years across dates shouldn't require a degree in calendar math. Yet here is a user, with a straightforward spreadsheet, start dates in Column A, end dates in Column B, asking how to calculate the number of financial years those spans cover. The answer, as they suspect, is not trivial. A financial year runs April 1 to March 31. A project that starts on May 1, 2024 and ends on June 1, 2026 touches three distinct financial years: 2024-2025, 2025-2026, and part of 2026-2027. The user's example shows two, which suggests they may be counting only fully or partially completed years. Either way, the logic is messy. And that is exactly the point.
This is the kind of problem that spreadsheet software has always handled poorly. You can write a formula, something using YEARFRAC or nested IF statements, but it breaks when dates span more than two fiscal periods, or when the start date falls near the boundary. The user is not struggling because they lack skill. They are struggling because the tool they are using was never built for this kind of thinking. Traditional spreadsheets treat dates as static numbers. They do not understand context. They do not understand that "financial year" is a concept, not a column.
What if the spreadsheet understood the question? Imagine typing "count financial years between these dates" and having the cell return the answer. No formulas. No edge cases. No Googling how to handle March 31 versus April 1. That is the direction AI-native spreadsheets are moving. They do not replace your logic; they handle the repetitive translation of human intent into machine calculation. The user's struggle is not a failure of their math. It is a signal that the tools we rely on are overdue for an upgrade.
Our opinion is plain: the gap between what people want to do with data and what they can do easily is too wide. This user's problem is real, common, and solvable. The path forward is not more documentation or fancier formulas. It is building tools that meet people where they are, with questions, not formulas. The next spreadsheet should let you ask "how many financial years does this span?" and trust the answer. That is not a distant promise. It is the logical next step in making data work for people, not the other way around.