..and also, say

${transaction.subtotal}

, this will include the currency symbol, how do we get the exact value only without the currency symbol

Have you tried converting it to a string? Something like ${transaction.subtotal?string.number} https://freemarker.apache.org/docs/ref_builtins_number.html#ref_builtin_string_for_number

@Paul that didn't work butthanks for the input