Recording money

You may find it useful to look at 'Introduction to Decimals' Factsheet 1 to revise the idea of place values.

Prices can be marked on goods, or spoken, in different ways, for example:

Money written in figures is always written with two decimal places. The decimal point marks the end of the whole numbers, and the two columns on the right are for the pence.

Price A above would be recorded as £60.00, using two trailing zeroes to record that there are no pence.

The items in example B would be recorded as £0.65, £0.70 and £1.00. The leading zero is used when there are no whole numbers.

C would be recorded as £2.05, not as £2.5. The zero here is a place holder, so that the value of the five goes in the correct column (it is 5 hundredths).

If you use a calculator for money questions, you need to know that it will not add trailing zeroes, so an answer of twenty pounds sixty pence would appear as 20.6; you need to record it as 20.60.