Decimal fidelity across platforms
Recently, I was reminded of a design conflict that arose during an enterprise quote-to-cash overhaul project. The trigger was hearing the story of the Mars Climate Orbiter which crashed on the surface of Mars because of a missed conversion of an imperial unit of measure to SI (metric) units between international collaborators.
Fortunately, my experience didn’t end in a cosmic crash but somewhere, accountants and auditors could be making reconciling adjustments every quarter to handle a discrepancy in currency decimal fidelity which results in slight variances in the native calculations for the same transaction across multiple platforms.
Let’s say your CRM Quote/Order solution is setup to handle a currency value that allows up to eight digits on each side of the decimal point like $12,345,678.87654321. This may be more common than you expect for businesses where utilization and micro-transactions aggregate to big ticket invoices.
Selling 10 million of something at $0.00000016 each is quite different than $0.0000002 each or $0.01 each as a line item. When forecasting, selling, billing, and accounting systems aren’t calibrated, there can be confusion and delay. Now, if each billing cycle generates hundreds or thousands of lines in this manner, the discrepancies could be disastrous for a business or their customers.
Maintaining transactional fidelity across systems of engagement is important to maintaining continuity for conversations with customers no matter where they engage with the business infrastructure or organizational structure. Regardless of the native transactional decimal precision of a platform, it’s important to maintain as much fidelity as possible for reference in case of a discrepancy that makes a real difference.
The quote-to-cash landscape has been called “the circle of death” by some informed participants. If you’re concerned about inconsistent reference decimal fidelity in your transactional reconciliations, contact Kumonami to design a consistent view for your customers, your partners, and your staff.
