openerp-expert-framework team mailing list archive

[Raphaël Valyi <rvalyi@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dominique,

My real concern is: do accountant just don't like that eventually OpenERP
will round differently than their accounting software based on BCD (given
that mathematically it's just as correct, it's just different base 10 vs
base 2). Which would be boring but acceptable to me.

Or, is that plain illegal in accounting which is then an other story? Then
please any law link?

This is boring because lots of rounding errors have always been pointed has
being a consequence of Float while none of them were so far (not even that
last one found at Publicus), so me or Fabien only defended that Float has
the required precision or could be dealt with, not about the fact that
Decimal favor the exact representation of base 10 decimals and might be
required by accountants which looks more like a convention issue (although
possibly a critical one, that's what I want to know).

I would really like accountants to confirm if that's illegal or just
annoying. And I would like to see Fabien's position on this.
I regret that people trying to convince me until them only used
the easiness of computation, strict equalities or precision arguments to
convince me while all those can easily be dealt with with Floats (the perf
tradeoff even looks positive to me), while indeed, I agree with you, if
there might be one big problem it would be this one: floating point make
simple operations not to round like manual base 10 accounting, is that
legal? is that just annoying?
Lot's of posts seem to point that floating point issue indeed
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/61872/use-float-or-decimal-for-accounting-application-dollar-amount
but
so far I can't see any legal reference regarding this.


Again, any law link? I can read things like if 3rd decimal reaches 5 should
be rounded up, else down. However, nowhere I can see if a 10^⁻17 epsilon is
tolerated in the computation before we do that rounding (it's hard for me to
believe it's not tolerable as it would make simple daily accounting pretty
challenging and that's why I ask for legal texts or specialists
interventions upon this).


Raphaël Valyi
Founder and ERP Consultant
+55 21 3010 9965
http://www.akretion.com

<http://www.akretion.com.br/>



On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 8:13 PM, bounaberdi <dominique.chabord@xxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

>
> Hi Raphaël
>
> I don't understand why evidence needs so much discussion.
> ""For me, with the eye of a physician"
> I understand this, but we talk about accounting. 1/3 is just not a number
> you can see in accounting.
> On the other hand there is no reason to argue and spend more time on this,
> since Fabien already gave the conclusion, V6 will behave as V3, V4 and V5.
>
> Now I just hope the stake about float/BCD is a little bit clearer for
> everybody, and consultants will provide clever advice to users.
> Thank you for your comments on my exemples.
>
>
> --
> View this message in context:
> http://openerp-expert-framework.71550.n3.nabble.com/float-errors-propagating-to-10-2-in-OpenERP-v5-tp1175425p1216860.html
> Sent from the openerp-expert-framework mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
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