* Bradley M. Kuhn <bk...@ebb.org> [2014-05-10 16:23]: > Their argument is that a rounding error is not material and therefore doesn't > matter. > > My argument is that if you have a series of rounding errors, they can add up > to a material amount over time.
I'm wondering what kind of examples you think of. Can you give some examples? It just seems like a fact of life to me that currencies like the USD, GBP and EUR track things on a cent / penny basis. Your bank is not going to track half a penny, so effectively the rounded amount is what you get and what matters. I'm trying to think of examples... I guess when a dividend is declared, you might get half a penny; but again, they cannot pay you half a penny, so what matters is what you get. And dividends are paid infrequently enough that it doesn't matter. Also, if a dividend is so low, you'd probably hold a large amount of shares, so half a penny would be a negligible amount of the total dividend you receive. Same with currency exchange. It makes sense for Oanda to track exchange rates on higher precision (it matters when you divide/multiply large amounts with the exchange rate), but again, when you actually change money it will be rounded to a penny. I think John's suggestion about adding the ability to specify precision for each commodity is a good idea (I'm not sure about accounts because accounts can contain multiple commodities). I think the pricedb should retain more precision, though, otherwise you lose important information. You say it might become material if it adds up... for that it would have to be very frequent transactions with low amounts, but when would you have frequent transactions with fractions of a penny? I can think of Bitcoin, but there you'd obviously need more precision. I'm wondering if you have examples involving USD. I'll try to check if the accounting standards have anything to say about this subject (but somehow I doubt it). -- Martin Michlmayr http://www.cyrius.com/ -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ledger" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ledger-cli+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
