Comment by XorNot
1 year ago
This is more a problem with ill-specified contracts though. It was a constant source of annoyance when I was sole-trading for a bit, because what happened was something like this:
I'd be quoted a day-rate. That was what I was actually going to get paid, one day. But then I'd be told to bill it as an hourly rate. And then actually to bill it as 7.5 hours.
But I wasn't told what the hourly was - the hourly was whatever my day rate was, divided by 7.5. So this led to the problem that it produced an irrational number as a result.
Technically this should've been fine...except no one I dealt with knew or cared about this concept - they all used Excel. So if I rounded the irrational to nearest upper cent (since that's the smallest unit which could be paid) they complained it didn't add up. If I added a "correction item" to track summing up partial cents, they complained it wasn't part of the hourly.
In the end I just send python decimal.Decimal to maximum precision, flowed through invoices with like 8 digits of precision on the hourly rate, and this seemed to make Excel happy enough. Of course it was completely useless for tracking purposes - i.e. no one would ever be able to pay or unpay 0.666666666667 cents.
Because what's not in employment contracts that really should be? Any discussion on how numbers are to be rounded in the event of uneven division. You just get to sort of guess what accounting may or may not be doing. In my case of course it didn't matter - no one was ever going to hold me to anything other the day rate, just for some reason they wanted to input tiny fractions of a cent which they actually couldn't track.
And it's not an idle problem either: i.e. in the case of rounding when it comes to wages, should it be against the employee? It's fractions of a cent in practice, but we're not going to define it at all?
The example of the price and units is actually a real-world example. If you look at how much you pay for electricity you'll see you're paying something like 0.321 per KwH and you're not billed in full units.
Your issue is just people being lazy and forcing a day rate into an hourly employment system.
> the hourly was whatever my day rate was, divided by 7.5. So this led to the problem that it produced an irrational number as a result.
The only way for this to be true is if your day rate was irrational to begin with.
Irrational is the wrong word, it was a .3 or .6 repeater or something similar. Same effect: pile in digits so excel would round it off correctly back to the original rate I was quoted.
Assuming your day rate was a multiple of 10, it can only have been a .3 or .6 repeater (or an integer), because dividing a multiple of 5 by 7.5 gives you an integer number of thirds.