Appendix C. USING THE EURO › C.4 Considerations When Performing Euro Conversion

C.4 Considerations When Performing Euro Conversion

VALIDITY OF fffCOST AFTER EURO CONVERSION

Converting at the beginning of a new accounting year is
essential to protecting the validity of your CA MICS
Accounting and Chargeback files.  However, there is one
element in some of the CA MICS resource files that this
procedure cannot protect.  This element is fffCOST, where fff
is the CA MICS file designation.  At the DETAIL timespan,
this element contains the sum of the charges associated with
the unit of work to which the observation refers.  At higher
timespans, it is the sum of the charges for the units of work
summarized into that observation.

If your CA MICS Accounting calendar does not match your
CA MICS calendar, you may be converting from national
currency to euros in the middle of a CA MICS month.  In this
case, the fffCOST element at the higher timespans will be the
sum of charges calculated in both your national currency and
euros; therefore it will be corrupt.

Note: The fffCOST elements are not used by CA MICS Accounting
and Chargeback in any way.  They exist for your convenience.
You will have to evaluate the reports used at your site to
see how you may be affected by this.  This is discussed in
more detail in Section C.1.2.


EURO CONVERSION AND ROUNDING RULES

The following conversion and rounding rules have been
established for the euro conversion process.  You will need
to follow these rules when converting your rates and other
amounts from your national currency to euros.

o  Conversion rates will be defined in terms of one euro to
   each of the participating Member State's currencies.  The
   rates will be defined with six significant digits.

o  Conversion rates cannot be rounded or truncated.

o  You cannot use the inverse of the defined rate to convert
   in the other direction.  In other words, to convert an
   amount from a national currency unit to the euro unit, you
   must divide the amount by the conversion rate.  To convert
   an amount from the euro unit to a national currency unit,
   you must multiply the amount by the conversion rate.

o  Converting between two national currencies must be done as
   follows:

   - Convert from the first national currency unit to the
     euro unit.  The result has to be calculated to at least
     three decimal places.

   - Convert the euro amount to the second national currency
     unit.

   - Alternative methods of calculation can be used as long
     as they produce the same results as the above algorithm.

o  Charges must be rounded up or down to the nearest cent.

   - Intermediate amounts calculated as part of another
     calculation do not have to be rounded to the nearest
     cent.

   - If a conversion results in a euro figure exactly halfway
     between two cents, the figure must be rounded up.


ROUNDING PROBLEMS

One of the euro conversion rounding rules states that an
amount that is exactly halfway between two euro cents must be
rounded up.  Ensuring that this occurs is not as simple as it
might seem.  In SAS, running on an IBM mainframe, all numbers
are stored in floating point representation in hexadecimal.
This means that certain numbers cannot be represented
exactly, which can cause problems in rounding.

Note that the SAS ROUND function does not always round up
numbers that are exactly between two cents.  The results
depend on the magnitude of the number.  Therefore, when
assessing your conversion code, you must evaluate a wide
range of numbers to be sure that the rounding is done
properly.