Deb,
To accomplish this you should use the subtotal feature. Make sure your data
is sorted by month (you say broken down by month but I am not sure how) and
then go to Data Subtotals and change the box that reads SUM to AVERAGE,
and then select "At each change in COLLECTIONS (or whatever you have called
that column.

Hope this helps.

"Deb" wrote:

I have a spreadsheet that has 29 clients information for the year 2004,
broken down by month and they've asked me to average out collections,
services provided etc. I need to have this reflect the average per month.

I first tried totalling all columns and then put basic average formula like
this in =average(d4:d541) and figured, but I'm not sure that using this
formula has given me the average per month. Would this have given me the
average per month for the entire year?

Thanks in advance for your help