Calculating an average vs. weighted average

Your description kind of mashes up a lot of different things but I'm trying to get the idea by looking at your file.

In your situation, it's not really a weighted average. You have a total weight produced and a total production cost, and a total transport cost. This makes the weight per pound very easy. You just take the sum of the costs and divide by the sum of the weights. It looks like you are already doing this in rows 3-7 and including the corresponding transport cost (which is a little confusing since this is not described anywhere in your question). So I don't understand what you need that you don't already have. I think someone is either not understanding your data or not understanding what a weighted average is.


Note: Here is the typical weighted average problem. This type of thing comes up in cost accounting.

Suppose you have five items. Each item has a number of units produced. Each item has a unit cost in dollars. To get the average weighted unit cost in dollars, you first multiply each item's unit cost times the number of units for that item. Then you add up all the products of those multiplications and divide by the total number of units for all items, and you get a weighted average cost per unit.

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Thank your for the response. I admit my post wasn't the greatest in explaining things; I was in a panicked rush when I typed it hahaha.

But that was exactly my thinking when I sent this out and got back the response for a weighted averaged. A WA is usually calculated when you can, say apply a weight or percentage to an exam, let's say, compared to other exams in a given duration, and then you get the average from that.

My data is a bit more complex because there's two units, Lbs and $ costs, with multiple assets that I have to account for. I was confused with their question because I figured the weights in this case could either refer to the Lb produced as a % of the total production pounds, or total costs (transport + production) as a % of the outright total costs. Last night though when I tried to write my formulas to do this, the math either resulted in 0, an error message, or the same averages I had calculated anyways.

So I'm not sure. Maybe I'm wrong and missing something, but it appears here that with this situation, you can't really calculate a weighted average cost/Lb.

Thanks again for the help.