Taking care of the pennies. Rounding errors!

[John Whitmore]

On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 09:48:40PM +0000, Maf. King wrote:
> On Sat 31 October 15 20:47:03 John Whitmore wrote:
> > While I'm here I'm afraid I have to ask another question.
> > 
> > Should I worry about rounding errors? I'll explain my specific situation.
> > 
> > I bought items for a total of 201.51 Euros
> > That total included UK Vat at a rate of 20%
> > 
> > I create an invoice for the vendor:
> > 
> > Unit price 201.51 euros
> > Taxable
> > Tax Included
> > Tax Table Vat @ 20%
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > That creates a calculated sub total of 167.93 Euros
> > 
> > When I post this invoice, due to rounding errors, GnuCash thinks I now owe
> > amazon 201.52, even though I told it the unit price including tax was 201.51
> > 
> > My problem is that there's a currency conversion here. My actual pre-tax
> > bill would have been 167.925 but if I put this in as the unit price,
> > excluding tax at 20% rounding will cause the bill to again be 201.52
> > 
> > if I aim lower and say 167.92 then the bill will be 201.50
> > 
> > I can get a total including tax of 201.50 or 201.52 but not the actual
> > amount 201.51
> > 
> > Is this even an issue? Well I don't know but either Gnucash will always
> > think I owe amazon a single cent or the bank will be a cent out. Which is
> > better?
> > 
> > 
> > 
> 
> Hi John,
> 
> I tend to put a correcting line of + or - (ususally) a penny or two on 
> invoices where I can't get the numbers to agree.
> 
> I'll tend to put the penny in the VAT account, and mark it non-vatable to 
> prevent further rounding error....
> 
> so the vendor bill in your case would look something like
> 
> bought widgets ...  expenses:widgets   1  201.52 x x  ...
> vat rounding    .... VAT:VatBox4       1   -0.01 .  .  ...
> 
> This is for business accounts - I don't use the vendor bills stuff for my 
> personal accounts.  regardless, I hate to be off by a penny or more anywhere!
> 
> HTH,
> Maf.
> 

Cheers Maf, worked a treet. Small steps here 

who knew running a business could be such fun ;-)

john