Open almost any exchange rate table and one column looks out of place. Next to the yen, the forint or the won there is a small number — 100, sometimes 1,000 — where other currencies have a 1.
That number is the quotation unit, and it is the most frequently misread piece of information in any rate table.
What it means
An exchange rate is a price: how much of one currency you get for another. For most pairs the price is quoted per single unit — one euro, one pound, one dollar.
For currencies with a very low unit value, quoting per single unit produces numbers that are awkward to read and to typeset. One Japanese yen is worth well under a euro cent. Published to the usual four decimals, most of the significant digits would be zeros.
So the convention is to quote the price of 100 units instead. The number in the table is the price of a hundred yen, not one.
Where this goes wrong
This is the single most common bug in currency converters, and it is invisible: the result looks perfectly plausible, it is simply a hundred times off.
A converter that takes the published figure and treats it as the price of one unit will tell someone that 10,000 yen is worth a hundred times more than it is. Nothing errors. Nothing looks broken. The number just happens to be wrong.
The same applies to the forint, the won, the Indonesian rupiah and, historically, several currencies that no longer exist.
How to read a table correctly
Three questions, in order:
- What is the quotation unit? If the column says 100, the price shown is for a hundred units.
- Which direction is quoted? Some sources publish "how much of this currency per one euro", others "how much of the base currency per one unit of this one". The two are reciprocals and confusing them inverts the result.
- Is it a mid rate or a tradeable price? Reference rates published by central banks are neither buy nor sell — nobody exchanges at them.
Why quotation units still exist
They are a leftover from printed rate lists, where column width was a physical constraint, and they persist because changing them would break every downstream system that has parsed those lists for decades.
There is a practical argument too. A rate quoted per 100 units moves in figures a person can hold in their head. Per single unit, the same movement happens in the fifth decimal, where nobody can see it.
What we do about it
Every rate on this site carries its quotation unit, and every conversion divides by it before doing anything else. The value shown as the rate is always the price of one unit, regardless of how the source published it — and that behaviour is covered by an automated test, precisely because it is the kind of mistake that ships silently.
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Frequently asked questions
How an exchange rate is actually set, what a spread costs on a real transaction, what happens when your income and your debt are in different currencies, and what to check before paying or being paid abroad. They explain mechanisms rather than forecast rates, and each one carries the date it was last revised at the top.
No. We publish no forecasts, price targets or trading calls, and no article recommends buying or selling a currency. Exchange rates over short horizons are close to unpredictable, and a site that pretends otherwise is selling something. What the articles do instead is explain the mechanism, so that you can read the news for yourself.
They are written by the kursdanas.rs editorial team. We accept no commissioned or sponsored articles, and advertising has no influence on what is published or on the order of anything in our tables. Where an article states a figure it names the source, and where we get something wrong we correct it and change the revision date shown on the page.