why can't Quicken handle more than 6 places past the decimal for investment shares?

System

This discussion was created from comments split from: Why can't I reconcile investment tranactions to more that 4 digits after decimal?.

shackelford

So here's my bigger question: why can't Quicken handle more than 6 places past the decimal for investment shares? I make investment buys in my 401K every 2 weeks. One of my 401K's funds has a NAV of ~$370 at the moment so my biweekly buys are always less than a single share. Worse, the fund deducts a small fee (e.g. $0.06) for each transaction which is shown as Shares Removed and a very small number (e.g. -0.000160187). Because Quicken only tracks to 6 places past the decimal, that gets truncated to -0.000160. Over time and many transactions, these become very large errors in the number of shares held. The larger the share price and the more transactions occur, the bigger the errors become. I hate to think what would happen if I was buying shares of Berkshire Hathaway where a $200 share purchase (0.000769674812391764 shares at $259,800/share) would get rounded to 0.000770 shares and induce a nearly 1% error for every transaction. I understand that Quicken tracks 11 significant digits with 6 digits max past the decimal. Why can't you just make it 11 digits with a floating decimal? That would solve the whole problem.