Properly Rouding Numbers is Important

So, I ran across a problem with QuickBooks that involves some of the most basic math that we were all taught in elementary school: how to round numbers properly. You’d think that a company that makes accounting and invoicing software for a living would understand how rounding of numbers works. But based on the last hour of having to edit the data that gets send to QuickBooks from our internal system you’d be wrong.

Let me explain; this involves the data we get for our customers from the Azure platform. In the line that I’m looking at there’s a quantity of 1.1208 and a unit price of $2.8417 (it’s Azure so the Quantity and Unit Prices look really weird for a lot of these line items. When you do the math for this it comes to 3.18497736, which you can see in my handy Windows calculator to the right.

QuickBooks uses four decimal places of precision in QuickBooks Online, so based on the rounding rules that we all learned in school, that number should round to 3.1850 as everything after the 1849 rolls up and changes the 9 to a 10, which then causes the 4 to become a 5. However, it appears that QuickBooks Online is simply truncating that value at the 4th decimal point because it thinks the number should be 3.1849, which is just wrong.

So the question is, why is this a big deal? We’re talking about a few hundred of a penny difference. And that’s correct. It is only a few hundredths of a penny, so that difference isn’t going to break the bank at DCAC or anything. It’s more about having to spend an hour or two each month making the data wrong so that QuickBooks will be happy with the data that comes in each month and the fact that the data in our system is now incorrect. Will it affect some bills? Maybe by a penny, and in the customer’s favor every time so far, but there’s no guarantee it’ll be in the customer’s favor every time. Not to mention, I’d really like to be able to stop editing the data.

Denny

Share

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Trust DCAC with your data

Your data systems may be treading water today, but are they prepared for the next phase of your business growth?