Maybe you should post what you think the real subroutine should look like. I suspect that the code is not being used more than once, there by negating the biggest incentive to turn it into a separate procedure. By the time you rewrite it properly, (by removing references to global variables, passing in parameters, etc.), it'll be longer and harder to understand. I'll go out on a limb here and say all the context you need is provided by an appropriate variable name, like $total_fee, for instance. But there's a chance that we'll just have to agree to disagree.