[trcollinson]

I have a number of clients who need to use up their budget for the year at the end of the year for technical goods and services. Each has a "wish" list of technical goods and services that they would like to pay for, some of which have taxes and other fees includes with them. There are no hourly fees, all of the services and goods are fixed cost, so that's good at least. But the lists can be really long and they aren't in a particular order. The problem is that my clients lose their budget if they don't use all of it exactly. So basically I need a solution that can pick the goods and services and calculate the taxes and fees so that the amount comes out to the exact left over of their budget. Of course, sometimes the budget will get changed by some annoying accountant mid day, so they have to be able to re-run it regularly. It's a real pain!

[AleksanderB]

>I have a number of clients

Could you tell me who are your clients or at least what sector they are in?

>Each has a "wish" list of technical goods and services

Could you give an example of the goods and services?

This sounds very much like a knapsack problem! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem)

[trcollinson]

Ha! It is :) well done. I put it in as a thought experiment and a joke. However, believe it or not, I actually do get these types of questions a lot from clients mostly in the publishing industry. They mostly want to spend all their budget down to the penny on things like new fonts and fixed price graphics sets.

At any rate, good job on catching my joke :) and I don't expect you to work on it. I hope someone gives you a real problem to try out!