Question

In SharePoint I can create a list column of type ‘Number’. I need to store monetary amounts and would like to be able to use this column type rather than having to create a new one.

Are values of this type stored and manipulated by SharePoint (e.g. when summing values in a list view) to prevent loss of precision (i.e. not as some kind of approximate floating point type)?

I have looked at currency columns but they seem to force display of a currency unit which doesn’t make sense in my application (and I have a suspicion that they are stored as ‘Numbers’ under the bonnet).

Answer 1

Although not conclusive, based on the following tests it looks like SharePoint handles numbers in a way suitable for monetary calculations (at least with WSS 3.0/SQL Server 2005) even though they are stored approximately. However, values with over 15 significant figures can exhibit rounding errors:

Test for money storage and retrieval

Three number columns (First, Second and Third) containing 3.7, 3.65 and 0.05 respectively (.Net example from here) and a calculated column (returning a single line of text) with the following formula: =IF(First=Second+Third,"Success","Failure"). On viewing the list the calculated column displays Success.

Test for money calculations

A Yes/No calculated column with the formula =0.1+0.1+0.1=0.3 (.Net example from here). On viewing the list the calculated column displays Yes.

Test for money storage and calculation I

In a list called TestList, a custom number column (CustomNumber) contains 304253.3251 (SQL Server example from Microsoft White Paper). This is stored in database table AllUserData, column float1 of type float (SQL Server 2005). float is an approximate data type.

Running the following queries:

DECLARE @ListName UNIQUEIDENTIFIER
SET @ListName = (SELECT tp_Id FROM AllLists WHERE tp_Title = 'TestList')

SELECT CAST(float1 as NUMERIC(18, 11)) AS CustomNumber 
FROM AllUserData 
WHERE tp_ListId = @ListName

SELECT float1 AS CustomNumber
FROM AllUserData 
WHERE tp_ListId = @ListName

Gives the following results:

CustomNumber
304253.32510000002

CustomNumber
304253.3251

Creating a calculated column with the formula =CustomNumber*100000000000 which might be expected to display the incorrect value of 30425332510000002 actually displays the correct (from the user’s perspective) value of 30,425,332,510,000,000.00000. I assume that this behaviour is due to the code reading the float value from the database doing a cast to numeric with a suitably small number of decimal places and manipulating the values in memory using the .Net Decimal type.

There are suggestions, however, that on SQL Server 2000 calculation errors may manifest in this case since the behaviour of float values has been altered between the versions.

Test for money storage and retrieval II

Based on the results from the previous test add the following value to the CustomNumber column: 9999999999999999.

This 16 significant digit value is displayed incorrectly in the list (and edit) views as 10,000,000,000,000,000 (using a value with 15 digits displays correctly).

Inspecting the AllUserData table shows that the value is stored incorrectly in the database and running the following query:

DECLARE @f FLOAT
SET @f = 9999999999999999
SELECT CAST(@f as NUMERIC(20, 0))

Gives the result:

10000000000000000

Which demonstrates that SQL Server is rounding the number on insertion.