**Our Take: The Formula Problem Is a Red Herring, Your Tool Is What's Failing You**
The question from /u/Babe223377Jess isn't really about a recalcitrant percentage formula or a daily average that refuses to behave. It's about a tool that was never built to do what you're asking. You want monthly totals that update, a daily average that adjusts as new months arrive, not a static 12-month divisor, and a clean percentage of denied versus approved refunds. That's not a spreadsheet problem. That's a legacy-tool problem. The zeros you can't remove and the formula that won't cooperate are symptoms of something deeper: you're asking a tool designed for static, one-off calculations to behave like a living system. It can't. And it won't.
Here's what that means for you in practical terms. A traditional spreadsheet calculates from what you give it, not from what the data *becomes*. When you add a new month, your daily average should divide by the number of days in the months you've actually recorded, not by 365 or by 12 months from January. That's an adaptive average, and it requires the tool to know when data arrives, not just where you paste it. Similarly, your percentage of denied refunds should be a simple ratio of denied to total, but if the tool is formatting the result as text or appending hidden decimal places, you're fighting the interface instead of solving the problem. The two zeros you couldn't delete weren't a bug. They were the tool telling you it doesn't handle live, growing data gracefully.
We think the real frustration here isn't about learning a better formula. It's about realizing that the spreadsheet you're using was built for a world where data is entered once and analyzed in isolation. You're living in a world where data flows in monthly, where averages must adapt, and where a percentage should just *be* a percentage, no hidden formatting, no phantom zeros. That's the gap between chasing a workaround and using a tool that matches your workflow. The question isn't "How do I fix this formula?" The question is "Why am I still fixing formulas when the data should just work?"
Our opinion is straightforward: stop fixing the formula and start exploring tools that treat your data as what it is, a live, growing set of numbers that should update themselves. Look for an AI-native spreadsheet that understands time-series data, that adjusts averages automatically as months are added, and that formats percentages correctly because it knows what a percentage is supposed to look like. You're not asking for anything exotic. You're asking for modern, human-centered data management. The solution isn't a better workaround. It's a better foundation.