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Currency Data Type

Currency is a column data type built for money values. It appears alongside the familiar types — Numeric, Integer, Text, and the rest — in every data-type list, and it stores amounts as exact fixed-point decimals: 18 digits of precision with 4 decimal places. That is room for roughly ±100 trillion, exact to 1/10,000 of a unit, with no floating-point rounding.

The payoff is speed. A Currency column occupies half the in-memory width of a Numeric column, so dashboards and workflow steps that scan tables full of amounts read roughly half the data and finish faster. Numeric remains the high-precision default (38 digits of precision, 10 decimal places); Currency is the leaner type you opt into wherever the values are money.

When to Use Currency

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Choose Currency for columns that hold monetary amounts — cost, revenue, price, margin, spend, allocated amounts. These are the columns that dominate profitability and financial models, so retyping them is usually the single biggest win for scan-heavy dashboards and workflows.

Stay with Numeric when:

  • Values could exceed roughly ±100 trillion, or need more than 4 decimal places — think FX rates, unit rates, percentages, and allocation factors
  • The column mixes money with other measures, or you are not sure what it will hold

Where to Set It

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Currency is available anywhere you choose a column’s data type.

In a Workflow Step’s Column Mapping

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In any step’s output column mapping — the data mapper grid — pick Currency from the column’s data-type dropdown, the same way you would choose Numeric or Text. The step writes that column as Currency from the next run onward.

In a Table’s Column Properties

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Open a table’s Column Properties and use the Data Type control to switch a column between Numeric and Currency. The change takes effect the next time the table is rebuilt — for example, the next time the workflow step that produces it runs.

With an AI Assistant or MCP Tooling

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Agents connected over MCP can set the type too: the data-type value is currency wherever a column type is given — creating a column, defining a table, or configuring a step. Asking your assistant to “make the amount columns currency” is often the fastest way to retype a wide table.

How Currency Behaves

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A few rules keep Currency predictable across the platform:

  • Currency is always your explicit choice. Imports, type auto-detection, SQL results, and derived columns (sums, expressions, allocation outputs) always default to Numeric. Where you want Currency on a result, retype that output column yourself.
  • Once set, it is remembered. A column declared Currency stays Currency through reads, downstream steps, and table rebuilds. When a downstream step populates its column mapping from the table, the Currency type carries into the step’s configuration automatically.
  • Aggregations return Numeric. A SUM or other aggregation of a Currency column produces a Numeric result — set the output column back to Currency if you want the aggregate stored that way.
  • Empty cells import as 0. In file imports, an empty cell in a Currency column loads as 0, exactly as it does for Numeric.
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