I take it you're making a graphical user interface. Rather to us an integer or a float depends on if you're going to allow someone to insert fractions of a credit. If you allow only 1 credit at a time, which seems to be most sensible, us an integer. Once you detect that the player clicked insert credit, credits = credits - X (X being number of credits inserted) or credits-- to decrease by one.

As to converting the number, in C++ you can use std::stringstream like so

std::stringstream ss;
ss << credits;
std::string creditString = ss.str(); // returns string representation of credits.

I take it you're making a graphical user interface. Rather to us an integer or a float depends on if you're going to allow someone to insert fractions of a credit. If you allow only 1 credit at a time, which seems to be most sensible, us an integer. Once you detect that the player clicked insert credit, credits = credits - X (X being number of credits inserted) or credits-- to decrease by one.