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Re: rounding problems

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At 01:48 AM 5/13/2008, Justin wrote:
I have very annoying problem that i would like to get a work around in place so the data entry people stop trying to kill me.

Normally people give quotes out of the price book which was done in Excel like 15 years ago and just has been updated over the years. the problem is excel is rounding differently than postgres 8.3.1 (Yes i know Excel rounds incorrectly) which results in normally being pennies off but on large qty its usually under a few bucks on the postgresql side. We internally don't care but those annoying customers scream bloody murder if the quote don't agree to the penny on the invoice Even when its to their benefit .

Has anyone every got  Postgresql and Excel to agree on rounding.
I have checked excel up to Office XP and its still wrong. (open office was looked out and the people screamed really loudly NO )

Another annoying thing is the calculators on everyones desk get it wrong to if the rounding is turned to 2 places.

Although my TI-89, and TI-36X calculators agree perfectly with postgresql .

Bad news, the Excel thing is probably doing math very wrong.

Also, my guess is you're treating one penny as 0.01, which is also wrong.

When you do financial calculations you should avoid floating point where possible. Floating point is really tricky to get right. There are scary books on it.

I'm no expert in financial calculations and floating point stuff, my _guess_ is a good start is probably treating one penny as 1, instead of 0.01. But better wait for the experts to chime in.

That said, if you're going to insist on using the wrong numbers from the Excel Invoice, can't you work some way of getting them into Postgresql and stored "as is", rather than having Postgresql calculate them differently ( I suspect you're using floating point in postgresql and so it'll be wrong too, just maybe a bit less wrong than Excel ;) ).

Regards,
Link.







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