Base currency and how foreign amounts are valued
Every total, report and net worth figure is shown in one currency — your base currency. Each account keeps its own currency (a USD brokerage, a EUR card, an SGD bank account), and the app converts to your base currency whenever it adds things up.
Setting your base currency
You choose it during first run. To change it later:
- Open Settings → Currency & format.
- Under Base currency, pick the new currency.
- A dialog, Switch base currency to …?, lists any amounts you typed in by hand (see below). Click Switch to … to confirm.
What converts and what doesn’t. Account balances, transactions and holdings carry their own currency, so they convert correctly. Amounts you typed in yourself don’t — the same number is simply read in the new currency. Switching from USD to EUR turns “$5,000 monthly expenses” into “€5,000”, not its euro equivalent. The dialog lists exactly which of these you have:
- monthly net income and monthly expenses (on your Profile)
- the low-balance alert threshold (on your Profile)
- monthly retirement spending (Plan → FIRE Settings)
- liability balances and monthly payments you entered by hand
- category budgets
Re-enter those afterwards. If you have none, the dialog says so.
A transaction’s value is fixed when you record it
When you record a transaction in a foreign currency, its value in your base currency is worked out once, when you save it, using the exchange rate at that moment — and then kept. It doesn’t move every time exchange rates change.
Why: a transaction is something that already happened. If last month’s €4.50 coffee were re-valued every day, your past spending would keep changing on its own — a month that cost $2,000 could show as $2,050 next week with nothing you did. Fixing the value keeps your history steady.
Two things to know:
- The rate used is the one when you saved it, not the rate on the transaction’s date. For something you enter the same day, that’s the same thing. For a transaction you enter or import weeks later, it’s the later rate.
- You can set the exact value yourself. Open the transaction and enter Value in
— for example, the amount your card actually charged after conversion. It stays as you entered it. Change the transaction’s own amount and the value is worked out again.
Changing your base currency is the one time past values are recalculated: every foreign-currency transaction is re-expressed in the new base currency at current rates.
Account balances and holdings are always shown at the current rate — they’re what you have now, not past events.
Where exchange rates come from
Rates are fetched automatically from Yahoo Finance, on the same schedule as prices — you never enter or maintain them. If a rate can’t be fetched, the last good one is kept until a fresh one arrives. Each rate is also checked against its reverse (USD→EUR against EUR→USD) so a provider glitch can’t suddenly make a currency look a thousand times bigger. See Prices aren’t updating.