This is a small write-up on the issue of using Float vs Decimal for representing monetary data in financial software.
When I started to work on Mostfit in Jan'09 I used integers for monetary data. In india we could store rupees, in other countries we could simply store 'cents' and then add the decimal point with a helper in the views.
Later we move to using 'floats'... It is often said that floats are no adequat for monetary data as they are inacurate. Example:
1.2 - 1.0 == 0.2 # => false, in most languages
When we apply rounding OVER EACH OPERATION we can largely fix this problem but it is not nice.
There are numerous sources claiming float for monerary data are evil, here are some link to that:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1019939/ruby-on-rails-best-method-of-handling-currency-money
https://lists.launchpad.net/openerp-expert-accounting/msg00070.html
The last link is from a Tryton dev who forked OpenERP. The next link is from the founder of OpenERP on the merits of floats for financial data:
https://lists.launchpad.net/openerp-expert-accounting/msg00067.html
Besides OpenERP also Lazy8Ledger uses floats. That said most others use singed integers (possibly wrapped in some sort of 'decimal' class for carrying the decimal point).
A slightly relating issue is rounding. Mathmatically we round 'halfs' as shown in the following pseudo code:
round(1.5) == 2 and round(0.4) == 0
But in financial software we often find a rounding method know as half to even (alternatively known as Dutch, statistical or financial rounding).
In Ruby the BigDecimal class facilitates this kind of rounding, the Float class does not.