I discovered that under some conditions you can get rounding errors with round when converting the number to a string afterwards.
To fix this I swapped round() for number_format().
Unfortunately i cant give an example (because the number cant be represented as a string !)
essentially I had round(0.688888889,2);
which would stay as 0.68888889 when printed as a string.
But using number_format it correctly became 0.69.