Why are rates calculating to large number of decimal places?

When you open a report, you may be surprised to find that some rates are displayed to large number of decimal places. You know you didn't do this in the administration interface, so how did those numbers get there? There are two ways this typically happens. First, you may have a rate modifier in place that results in an odd markup. For example, if you have chosen to increase rates by a percentage, then when Projector multiplies out the values, you get decimal places.

Base Rate = $66.67. Markup = 25%. 66.67 * 1.25 = 83.3375

Another reason you may see odd rates is because Projector back calculates rates in reports. This means that we look at the total number of hours, the total revenue/cost of those hours, and then divide them to get the rate. Why not just bring in the original rate? The reason is that Projector pivot tables perform aggregation. In order to get the most accurate rates possible, it is best to divide backwards. Our ancillary help topic, Why are my rates off by a penny? explains how this works.

By back calculating the rates we ensure that during data aggregation, that small amounts don't add up to large discrepancies in your rates. You can imagine if you built a sum of a large set of rates, and they were all off by a penny, that the end sum would be way off!