Investment holdings floating point number math error

molehill6804

The calculations in the investment hub (/investing) appear to have a math error. I am trying to track cryptocurrency in the app, and I am seeing what appears to be floating point math errors causing my balance to be slightly off.

For example, in one of my accounts, the balance is reported as 0.044337430000000004shares. This is far more significant digits than the cryptocurrency has natively and happened when I added a small number of shares to my existing balance. I believe this is due to the app using some sort of floating point math leading to the extraneous digits at the end.

I believe that cryptocurrencies, much like currencies or shares, should instead be represented with so-called "Decimal" or "Currency" numbers to eliminate floating point arithmetic errors such as this. In an ideal world, the app would take into account the precision provided by the native blockchain to set the available number of decimal points (i.e. 10^-8 for Bitcoin and Litecoin, 10^-18 for Ether, etc.) to allow for accurate accounting.

Coach Natalie

@molehill6804, thanks for posting to the Community!

Although I'm not sure how Quicken Simplifi is coded to work with cryptocurrency values, we have a support article available here that goes over tracking cryptocurrency: https://help.simplifimoney.com/en/articles/7919674-tracking-cryptocurrency-in-quicken-simplifi

The article lists the supported coins as well as goes over issues with cryptocurrency holdings in connected investment accounts. With that, are you working with a connected account or a manual account? Have you tried deleting and recreating the holding to see if that clears things up for you (if doing so doesn't mess anything up), by chance?

Please let us know so we can best assist!

-Coach Natalie