Understanding your budget currency

Every budget has one main currency. It’s the number on your Ready to Assign card, the number your categories are funded in, and the number every transaction — no matter what currency it was actually spent in — gets added up into.

How to pick it

Think about the last time you spent money in a currency you don’t normally use. To tell whether 450 of it was cheap or expensive, you converted it to some other currency in your head — probably without even noticing you were doing it.

That’s your main currency. Not the currency you earn in, not the currency of the country you’re standing in right now — whichever one you automatically convert prices into to judge them. For most people that’s simple. If you live and earn in the same place, it’s that place’s currency. If you’re a nomad or you travel a lot, it’s usually the currency you’d tell a friend your rent or your salary in.

What it converts, and what it doesn’t

Your accounts don’t have to match your budget’s currency. A card in euros, cash in another country’s currency, an account back home — each one just holds its own currency. The budget adds them all up by converting every transaction into your main currency, using the real exchange rate for the date that transaction actually happened.

Never a guessed number

If the app hasn’t fetched a rate for a given date yet, it shows Needs FX instead of a made-up number — never a rounded estimate pretending to be exact. The rate fills in automatically in the background; you don’t have to do anything, and you’ll never see a wrong number in the meantime.

Changing it later

• Only from the web app — Settings → Budget Settings. There’s no way to change it from mobile.
• It only affects what’s ahead. Changing it changes what new activity totals in going forward — it doesn’t rewrite the currency your past transactions were already recorded and converted in, so don’t change it back and forth expecting old numbers to follow along.

Traveling or living across currencies

This is the case the whole system is built for. Say you earn in one currency, keep a card in a second, and are currently spending your way through a third country. You don’t need to convert anything by hand, and you don’t need one account per currency you might ever touch:

• Add an account for each place your money actually sits, in whatever currency it’s actually in.
• Keep your main currency as the one you think in — the one from the heuristic above.
• Every transaction, in every account, shows up converted into that one currency on your budget, at that day’s real rate.

You’ll still see each account’s own balance in its own currency when you’re looking at that account directly — nothing is hidden or replaced. The conversion only happens where it’s useful: your budget total, and the small converted amount shown next to a foreign-currency transaction.