To support a high-level of accuracy when managing financial transactions, FastTrack360 supports the ability to calculate and store monetary values with a maximum rounding precision of six decimal places. However, to achieve pay and bill totals with a rounding precision of two decimal places, rounding can be applied in various ways in the system.
The following is a guide that explains how rounding is applied in FastTrack360, the various places in the system where rounding can be applied and what the effects are as well as recommendations on how the rounding should be configured at each point.
Rounding Types and Values
Wherever rounding can be configured in FastTrack360, the following settings must be defined:
Rounding Type
This identifies if values are to be rounded or truncated to a certain number of decimal places.
For example, 7.3467 rounded to two decimal places is 7.35 while the same value truncated to two decimal values is 7.34.
Rounding Value
This identifies the number of decimal places to which values are to be rounded or truncated. This can be a value from 0 to 6 decimal places.
Rates and Rules Maintenance
When creating pay agreements and bill agreements in the Rates and Rules module, you have the ability to set rounding on Pay Rate Rules and Bill Rate Rules, whereby the rounding on each rule can be different. That rounding is applied to the total of the Pay Rate Rule or Bill Rate Rule, as calculated by the Interpreter.
For example, Figure 1 below shows the pay rate and bill rate results in the Interpreter, where the applicable Pay Rate Rule and Bill Rate Rule are configured to round to two decimal places.
Figure 2 below shows the same pay and bill results where the Pay Rate Rules and Bill Rate Rule rounding has been set to four decimal places instead.
There are several places that rounding occurs in the system, documented in the Rounding Configuration Guide below that provides our recommendations.
In any financial system, there will be occasions where there are minor discrepancies with the figures displayed. In FastTrack360 we recommend 6 decimals, however, figures displayed on invoices are usually 2 or 4 decimal places, so there may be a discrepancy in what is shown.
Example: 4 decimal places with standard rounding, 0.005+ gets rounded up to 0.01 and anything less than 0.005 is rounded down to 0.00.
Two line items of $10.0045 total to $20.009.
As the invoice is setup to show only 2 decimal places, this will display as $10.00 each.
The total would be $20.00, however, due to the rounding, the total will display as $20.01.
Additionally, when it comes to invoices, FastTrack360 will add grouped items together, and then apply the rounding to the sum of those items.
There are options to handle this:
On your invoice template, increase the number of decimal places printing on the invoice
Alternatively, you can include a rounding line, however this requires that the columns in the Invoice Items table include the GST and Total columns. The rounding line will show the rounding difference between the sum of the values in the column and the corresponding total shown.