Inaccurate calculations when buying investments

When investing, the number of shares (units) bought at a particular price are used to calculate the total cost. You may find that sometimes the total amount in Money is different to the total that your broker or investment company calculates.

For example, if you invested a check for $2500, they may have bought 48.819 shares at $51.21 for you. However, when entering this into Money, it calculates $2500.02.

The reason is that the company is rounding the number of shares or the price, but when you enter it into Money, the program just calculates the total based on the figures you have put into the program.

To avoid this issue, it is advisable to leave the share value blank when entering the transaction, but put in the total ($2500) amount instead and number of shares. This way, the number of shares exactly matches what the investment company have given you, but a slight adjustment on the share value is used instead which will cause the totals to be matched. In the above case, the share price would be $51.20957.