On Fri, Jul 07, 2000 at 01:51:35PM -0500, Richard Wackerbarth wrote:
>
> Right. And the dry goods were either measured in units of (3 inches) or
> greater or no effort was made to account for the individual amounts sold.
>
> Particularly in a business such as dry goods, the amount that you actually
> receive does not match the amount for which you were charged. The merchant
> has figured this waste into the price he charges.
>
I just bought some velcro ribbon...trust me, the amount I actually
received matches the amount I bought to within at most 1/4". If I was
buying wide vellum from an art supply shop, it would be within 1/16".
>
> For such a merchant, it is far simpler to estimate the amount sold until he
> takes a physical inventory of what remains and makes the adjustment necessary
> to bring the inventory into balance.
>
Yes, yes. However the receipt I have, which is the merchants's original
transaction document, is written in yards. This merchant is measuring
(rational numbers) rather than counting (cardinal numbers), and
keeping track of cash at their register.
One of the ways in which the widespread availability of computers
transforms traditional bookkeeping practice is that jobs which were
previously back office are now done in real time at the cash register.
This, to me, suggests that gnucash might be more useful to these
merchants if it accomodated the way the merchants do business, rather
than requiring the merchant to do conversions into a traditional
accounting form.
I wonder...do you think that the ability to compute an approximate
inventory at any time would be of value to, say, a small fabric store?
It seems to me it would be helpful in maintaining inventory.
> >
> > According to my banking consultant friend, the major US banks he
> > worked for (Chase, Manufacturers Hanover, Citibank) did all their
> > dollar computations
>
> Computations are intermediate results which are never entered in the ledger.
>
> > to four decimals of precision and rounded to two for output;
>
> It is only this rounded result that gets posted to the ledger.
>
My consultant confirms this. I stand corrected.
>
> > Perhaps then for money four decimal points of precision (if rounding
> > after every computation is to the nearest 1/10,000th) is sufficient?
>
> We should make no such assumption.
>
Why not? Seriously, if the big banks do it, does gnucash need to do
more? Compute with four decimal places, store two, and stop agonizing
over it.
>
> For example, before decimalization, it would have been 1/240 Pound Sterling.
> I think that someone indicated that it is 0.05 Swiss Franc, etc.
>
Hmmmm...I wonder how international banks handle the problem.
--
Randolph Fritz
Eugene, Oregon, USA
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