Rounding off problem.

[Mike or Penny Novack]

Abhinav wrote:

>Hi Everyone!
>
>We've been using Gnucash for all accounting purposes in our organisation 
>for about two years now. And things have been going just fine!  :)
>
>Our accountant now wants us to round off figures. Basically if, the 
>value entered is 20,000.33, he wants us to round this off to 20,000.00 
>and if the value entered is 20,000.73 he wants us to round this off to 
>20,001.00. We need to do this on each entry in the journal - not just 
>for the totals.
>
>Is there any way to configure something like this with gnucash? We're 
>using gnucash version 2.0.5 on Debian (Etch).
>
Oddly enough, pretty difficult to implement. Since it seems that it 
would be easy, I will explain the issue (back when I did this for a 
living, often had to compute or correct a less experienced programmer's 
"fuzz" value).

The problem is that when SEVERAL numbers are rounded off individually 
the result of a mathematical operation involving them might not give the 
same result as when you first perform the operation with unrounded 
values and then round off the answer. The most obvious place this would 
come into play is with "splits" where GnuCash would be deciding that 
there was a (small) discrepancy. When I earlier referred to calculating 
a "fuzz value that's what I meant -- for some PARTICULAR computation the 
"difference error" which is to be ignored when deciding whether two 
values are or are not equal (it can't be a universal value or actual 
errors will be missed).

Here's an example. Suppose you have the following split:
          account-a            1000.98
              account-b                        500.49
              account-c                        500.49
    the transaction is in balance

          account-a            1001.00
             account-b                        500.00
             account-c                        500.00
             imbalance                            1.00
    the transaction is out of balance

Essentially you will have to do what your accountant wants by adjusting 
the figures when entered. In the above example, either the account-b or 
the account-c entry will have to be for 501.00 instead of 500.00 to keep 
the split transaction in balance and which to adjust can't easily be an 
automated decision. The computer has no way of "knowing" whether the 
numbers you enter are the correct ones and so can't determine (when it 
sees an imbalance) whether to "adjust" (randomly would prevent 
systematic error) or report the imbalance as an imbalance error.

Understandable that your accountant might want the final reports "whole 
dollar" but not so understandable at the "books" level as the whole 
basis of error finding in "double entry accounting" is that the books if 
correct are always in EXACT balance.

Michael