Having an issue getting a value to show up as Currency

[Alex_Wallon]

New to Airtable and trying to figure everything out. I have a base to keep track of inventory and sales. I have it set up where if I enter the platform it sold on, the formula in the next column will calculate the fees. For example, if I enter “Ebay” it calculates that the fees will be 9% of the selling price, and so forth. The issue is that the this value wont show up as currency ($) and won’t allow me to change it because it’s saying “Your result type is not a number or a date. Formatting options are currently only available if your result type is a number or a date.” Although it is a number. It’s just showing as a decimal rather than a dollar amount. Any suggestions?

This is the formula used in the column. It is calculating the correct amounts, just not in currency.

IF({Platform Sold}=“Poshmark”,({Sold Price})(.20))&IF({Platform Sold}=“Mercari”,({Sold Price})(.10))&IF({Platform Sold}=“Ebay”,({Sold Price})*(.09))

[Kamille_Parks · Accepted solution]

Try wrapping your formula in a VALUE() function, which should convert it into a number. You might also try writing multiplication like this: {Sold Price}*.2 rather than ({Sold Price})(.20).

Finally, for simplicity’s sake, your formula could use a SWITCH() function instead of several IF() statements:
{Sold Price}*SWITCH({Platform Sold},'Poshmark',.2,'Mercari',.1,'Ebay',.09)

[Justin_Barrett]

Aside from the excellent tip by @Kamille_Parks to change this to use SWITCH, your current formula isn’t formatted properly. You’re doing a series of individual IF functions tied together with the & concatenation symbol, which will merely mash all of their results together end to end as a string, instead of giving you a single numerical value that you can format as currency. What you should be doing is nesting the IFs inside each other. The basic format would look like this:

IF(condition1, value1, IF(condition2, value2, IF(condition3, value3)))

Also, you don’t need to wrap parentheses around individual field values in your calculations, so I stripped some of those extra characters out as well. Here’s the updated result:

IF({Platform Sold}="Poshmark", {Sold Price} * .20, IF({Platform Sold}="Mercari",
{Sold Price} *.10, IF({Platform Sold}="Ebay", {Sold Price} * .09)))

But again, I’d strongly encourage switching to SWITCH. It’s just a lot cleaner for this kind of situation.

[Alex_Wallon]

Thank you both, much appreciated. I’ll try it out.

[Alex_Wallon]

Thanks for recommending SWITCH, definitely makes sense to use, but I tried the switch formula you provided and it’s not working for some reason. It’s saying ‘invalid formula’. Is there something else i’d have to add? Sorry, I’m completely new to this.

[Alex_Wallon]

Nevermind, it worked perfectly! :joy: My mistake.