Organizations must manage the flow of resources in and out of the boundaries in order to survive. When resources become scarce, organizations can face operational problems. The problem of resource scarcity has produced a rich body of scholarship on what Thompson (1967) called ‘input transaction” strategies. For some classes of organizations, however, input transaction strategies are not practicable because new resource inputs either do not exist or are prohibitively expensive or difficult to secure. Organizations that manage nature resources are one example of this kind of organization. By studying how a water utility manages scarcity by “smoothing” the demand for water, this paper contributes to the undertheorized “output transaction” side of Thompson’s original formulation of the scarcity problem. To reduce demand for what it produces, the organization in this study persuades customers to use less by quantitatively refracting water into different kinds of numbers: volume, money, and time. This paper additionally contributes to the sociology of quantification by studying the process of producing many numbers to describe a single phenomenon or object. By highlighting how quantitative refraction enables the collaborative management of a complex resource like water, this paper advances our understanding of scarcity, persuasion, and quantification in organizations.