Writing 1 min read
Introducing: spending in another currency
Log a payment in one currency and read your totals in another. How Money Diary stamps an exchange rate on foreign entries and converts for display.
Zain Haroon — Full-stack Engineer
You paid for something in dollars, your ledger is in rupees, and now your month is wrong by whatever the rate was that day. Most trackers answer this by storing one number and hoping.
Money Diary keeps both: what you actually paid, and what it was worth in your currency at the time.
Logging a foreign payment
When you enter a transaction in a currency other than your workspace one, the form asks for the exchange rate: one unit of the payment currency in yours. It looks the rate up for you; when the lookup fails it says so and lets you type the rate yourself, which beats silently guessing.
That rate is stamped onto the entry. It does not drift afterwards, because what you paid in March does not change when the rate moves in July.
Reading it back
Your workspace has a display currency, set in Settings alongside the rest of your number formatting. Every total, chart and balance renders in it, converting the foreign entries using the rate each one carries.
The original is still on the record: a transaction paid in dollars shows the dollar amount it was paid in, next to what it counts for in your ledger. You lose nothing by converting, which is the reason to keep the stamp instead of overwriting it.
What this makes possible
- A subscription billed in USD that lands correctly in a PKR month.
- A trip abroad logged at the rates you actually got, not today’s.
- Split bills with someone whose ledger runs in a different currency, without either side having to do arithmetic.
The honest caveat
A converted total is only as good as the rate on the entry. If a lookup fails and you type a rough number, the ledger will believe you forever. Worth a second glance on anything large.