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Where the sign goes, and why the answer is different in every country.
Also known as: Currency symbol placement, Where to put the pound sign, Comma or point in money
The sign itself is the easy part. Whether it precedes or follows the number, whether a space separates them, and whether the decimal separator is a point or a comma are all national conventions, and getting them wrong is how a figure gets misread by a factor of a thousand.
The position of a currency sign relative to the amount, the presence of a space, and the characters used for the decimal and thousands separators are national conventions rather than properties of the currency.
Contexts: History
English-language practice puts the sign first and closed up; most continental European practice puts it after with a space. The euro is written both ways, following the local convention rather than a single European one.
Europe
The separators reverse between traditions: 1,234.56 in English-language practice is 1.234,56 in much of Europe. A figure copied across the boundary without conversion is wrong by three orders of magnitude, which is why the ISO three-letter code exists for anything machine-read.
The commonest and most expensive mistake in written money.
A currency sign set immediately before or after a group of numerals, with a point or a comma marking the fractional part.