Does Money handle foreign currency accounts?
Money by Zaweba lets an account use another currency, shown with its own symbol, but nothing is converted. Here is how that works in practice.
It does, up to a point. In Money by Zaweba every account has a currency, pounds by default, and you can give an account another currency, such as euros or dollars. Its amounts are then shown with that currency's symbol. What Money doesn't do is convert anything: there are no exchange rates in the app, so a euro balance stays in euros and isn't turned into pounds anywhere.
Knowing that from the start helps you decide how to set up an overseas account so the rest of your figures still make sense.
What works well
Keeping the account's own record is straightforward. Create the account with New account on the File menu, choose the currency, and give it an opening balance and date in that currency. The register shows date, payee, amount, category and memo as usual, with a running balance, all in the account's currency. Importing statements works the same way as for a pounds account, so a euro account at a bank that offers CSV, OFX or QIF downloads can be kept up to date in the normal way.
Categories, payee rules and splits all behave as normal within the account. If you have a holiday home's running costs or a small euro income, you can file them under the categories you already use.
Where the limits show
Because nothing is converted, anything that adds accounts together needs a little thought. Money's reports are built from account balances and categorised transactions. A 500 euro balance doesn't become a pounds figure for net worth, and euro spending in a category isn't turned into pounds before it's counted. Mixing currencies in a total that's meant to be in pounds will give a figure that doesn't mean much.
Transfers need the same care. A transfer in Money is a linked pair with the same amount on both sides. Moving money from a pounds account to a euro account involves an exchange rate, so a single transfer won't describe it accurately.
Ways to handle it
For a currency account you only use occasionally, the simplest approach is to keep it in its own currency and look at it on its own, using the register and its running balance. Leave it out of your thinking about pounds budgets and reports.
If the account matters to your overall picture, there are two common ways round the lack of conversion. One is to keep it in a separate money file. Each .ozm file is a complete, independent set of accounts, so a file for overseas affairs keeps those figures away from the household's pounds totals. The other is to track the account's value in pounds yourself, for example as a pounds investment account that you update by hand with Update value whenever you want to reflect a new balance at the current rate. That keeps net worth in a single currency.
For moving money between currencies, record the pounds side and the euro side as two ordinary transactions, each in its own account, with a memo noting the exchange. It's a little more typing but every balance stays right.
Everything else stays British
Outside individual account currencies, Money follows UK conventions throughout: pounds, dd/mm/yyyy dates and en-GB formatting, whatever the PC's own settings say. That's handy if your computer happens to be set to another region; your money file still reads the British way.
So Money by Zaweba handles foreign currency accounts in the sense that it keeps them accurately in their own currency. If you need automatic conversion, it's not built in, and one of the workarounds above is the way to go.
