Losing Decimal Precision

I’m losing the decimal digits out of a variable for Duration (Hours) when creating a Timebill record. Here is the code snippett:

for ( var i = 0; searchstudents != null && i < searchstudents.length; i++ )
    {
var searchstudent = searchstudents[ i ];
if (editts != "T") // Must be Create
{
  var hours = searchimport.getValue('custrecord7'); //Get hours
//  alert('Custom Hours' + " " + hours);
  var classdate = searchimport.getValue('custrecord6'); //Get Date
  var instrid = searchinstr.getId( ); //Get instr id
  var classid = searchclass.getId( ); //Get class id 
  
  recordCreated = nlapiCreateRecord('timebill');
  recordCreated.setFieldValue('employee', instrid);
  recordCreated.setFieldValue('hours', hours);

The alert will show the variable "hours" has 3.3 hours however when Timebill is created, Duration show 3.0.  Custrecord7 is a Decimal field in the custom record.  Any ideas?