“My imported amounts have lost their cents”
When 1,234.56 arrives in your ledger as 1234 or as 123456, nothing was rounded by accident: a decimal separator was read as a grouping separator or ignored entirely. The direction of the error tells you which of the two happened.
Symptoms
Amounts arrive as whole numbers with the cents dropped Amounts arrive a hundred times too large Only some rows are affected, typically those above a thousand
What actually causes it
The decimal separator was read as a thousands separator
In a file using the comma as a decimal separator, 1.234,56 means one thousand and change. An importer expecting the opposite convention reads 1.234 as a decimal and the remainder as noise, producing an amount that is wrong by a factor rather than by rounding.
The separator was stripped rather than interpreted
Some importers remove punctuation before parsing, turning 1.234,56 into 123456. The result is a hundred times too large, and because it is a clean number it passes every validity check the importer performs.
A spreadsheet reformatted the column
Opening the file in a spreadsheet with a currency format applied can round the displayed value, and saving writes the rounded figure back. The cents were present in the download and lost in the step you took to inspect it.
How to fix it
- Check the file with the tool below: it reports amounts written in a format it cannot interpret without guessing, rather than converting them silently.
- Compare one large amount in the file against the bank’s own display to establish which separator convention the export uses.
- Set the number format explicitly in your importer if it offers the choice, rather than relying on your system locale.
- Re-download rather than repair if a spreadsheet has already rounded the values; those digits are gone from the file, not hidden.
Related import problems
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The tool refuses to reinterpret ambiguous amounts and reports them instead, because a silent conversion here changes figures by a factor of a hundred. Free, no signup, no upload.
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