Why Does Xero Round Incorrectly?

[Mr Pointy]

I create invoices in Excel & it calculates VAT & rounds to 2 places: £x.886 is rounded to £x.89

When I create a matching invoice in Xero it rounds down to £x.88 so the invoice I send out doesn't match by 1p. Is there some accounting convention where sums are rounded down rather than 0-4 rounding down & 5-9 rounding up?

[droopsnoot]

Is it a single-line invoice, or a multiple line? Xero calculates VAT on a line-by-line basis which can lead to discrepancies if you're calculating it on the total, as I found out when sending invoices from a point-of-sale system that calculated the various VAT totals for the whole invoice.

More here: https://developer.xero.com/documentation/guides/ho...

I did a quick search on VAT rules and the explanation on how it's done was basically normal numeric rounding rules.

[Bradders278]

I have experienced this; and for me it was my excel formulas causing the issue.

I have cost and sell prices in one spreadsheet. And the sell price is shown as "currency" and rounded to 2 decimal places like you say. Some of my costs are dependant on exchange rate and as such the complex formula can often drive a number being something like 28.1232 - what what happening is that the Xero line was using 28.12 for the calculation (that's what I entered for the line) but I think Excel was doing some of my calculations based on 28.1232 so on high quantities I was getting 0.0032 extra which soon added up.

I now have a column where I copy over the whole column as-seen so that I start fresh - in this instance excel will be feeding 28.12 not 28.1232 if that makes sense?

I never figured the exact issue but that was my best guess - and for me it fixed the immediate problem of my Xero quote not matching my previous estimate which was driven by Excel.

Hope this may be of help!
Scott.

[MustangGT]

droopsnoot said:

Is it a single-line invoice, or a multiple line? Xero calculates VAT on a line-by-line basis which can lead to discrepancies if you're calculating it on the total, as I found out when sending invoices from a point-of-sale system that calculated the various VAT totals for the whole invoice.

More here: https://developer.xero.com/documentation/guides/ho...

I did a quick search on VAT rules and the explanation on how it's done was basically normal numeric rounding rules.

This,

As noted above VAT rounding follows normal numeric rounding rules. If you have a VAT calculation of £0.886 Xero should round up to £0.89. It does not have an automatic round down facility. You can overwrite it yourself though.