Rounding of time on time sheets is incorrect

Thanks Anan, that works. I also notice that I didn't help things by putting in two identical screenshots rather than showing both sides of the issue on two different screenshots. Your colleagues do need a solution for this though because I can bet this wouldn't go down well in the Accountancy community and given that I've invested in your company's expansion and I have done software development in my time I'm quite disappointed but thank you for your help in the workaround.

Hi John,

This system will always round up the value of £355.425 to £355.43. However if you want the system to show your total invoice amount as £658.72 you will need to manually deduct the difference amount so in this case you will need to deduct the extra 1p difference.

Anan

How do I get around it Anan?

Hi John,

This is an issue that has been forwarded to the development team and something that will be updated in the near future. Unfortunately, the way the system works is such that when creating the invoice the system only considers the first two decimal points hence your invoice subtotal for line item 2 is appearing as £355.42. Additionally once the invoice is created the system rounds the value which is why you see the total as £658.73 as opposed to the total of £658.72 within your invoice creation stage.

I appreciate this is not what you want the system to show. However this is how the system is set up to function. I apologise for not being of further assistance.

Anan

This gets even better! No word of a lie, it has taken me about four hours to get down to this being the problem. Its this sort of nonsense that made me move away from Xero. Turns out the invoice editing screen can show one total and then when you save the invoice it calculates another total. Was this really on the functional requirements for the system or was it put into the work list for a burn down run? What's the solution to this one?

You might have guessed that I am expressing a lot of frustration here and that's because I have a, not unreasonable, expectation that an accountancy system will add up numbers correctly. These issues with rounding were resolved a long time ago in wider field of databases and software etc. Please accept my apologies if this winds you up - its not meant to do that. My frustration is driven purely by the fact that I can ill afford to spend time patching up the mistakes of a system that I'm starting to rely on.

Having said that, the system is helping me spot a number of issues with a very difficult client account which I am very please with and thank you for that.

Also, having worked on your side of the fence, I know how difficult it is when you're working hard to provide a great product and you get customers like me ranting and raving and callling your work into question. So, I do understand and any help you can give in resolving this will be appreciated.

The issue is: I couldn’t get INV00002 to reconcile so I went into the invoice to check I had applied the recommended workaround correctly and yes I had because it was showing £658.72 which is what I wanted

Then when I saved the invoice, the total changed from £658.72 to £658.73. Because the system is rounding £355.42 on the edit screen into £355.43 in the total.

Hi John,

I believe that when Berhan says 'global' he means that it is an issue throughout the various parts of Clear Books' software, rather than it affecting other systems. Furthermore, we do appreciate that the workaround is not as straightforward as everyone would like, however, our developers are working on a way to improve this system for everyone and will hopefully be able to add something in the near future.

Chris

The other thing to consider.... You're asking people (like me) to invest money in your next expansion because you want to take on SAGE. How much of a market share do you think SAGE would have developed if it had a fundamental issue like this? Still prefer your system to SAGE anyway. 8-)

Dear Berhan,

I appreciate your advice but these systems are supposed to save time - not create work! I don't get why this is a global issue. When I was programming in the 80's the readily available commercial computers I was using could hold 16 decimal places. This seems more like a design flaw than a system limitation.

Hi John,

There is a global issue with rounding on Clear Books as it will only round to two decimal places. The technical team are aware of this and this is something that will hopefully be implemented in the future.

As a workaround you can edit the invoice once it has been created and update it with the unit price to a more accurate figure. This will then be used and calculated to give a more accurate figure.

I appreciate this can be quite a time consuming and laborious task but it will provide a more accurate price when using larger figures.