Guides · Travelling
A trip should not quietly rewrite the rest of your year.
You come home with a pocket of slips in another currency. Convert them all at today’s rate and you have invented a number that was never paid by anybody. Leave them out and the month is a lie of a different kind.
The usual mistake
One number, converted at the wrong moment.
The instinct is to turn every foreign slip into home currency straight away so that everything adds up. It is the wrong instinct, for a plain reason: the rate you use is a rate from the day you did the conversion, not the day you spent the money, and it will be a different rate next week. The total you carefully worked out stops matching itself.
It also throws away the only thing that was certain. The slip said forty-two euros. That is a fact and it will still be a fact in ten years. The eighty-something dollars you wrote down instead is an opinion with a date on it.
And it makes the comparison you actually want impossible. Two weeks in another country are not two normal weeks of your life. Folded into one home-currency total, it makes that month look wildly unlike every other month, and every comparison after it is worse.
The rule
Keep what was printed. Keep the rate you really paid.
A receipt keeps the currency it was printed in. Full stop. That is the record, and it is the only part that cannot go stale.
Then, separately, keep the rate you actually paid — not a published one. Those are different numbers, and the difference is the whole point.
Cash you exchanged
An exchange slip has two sides: what left your pocket and what came back. Those two numbers together are a rate, and it is the real one, with the spread and the commission already inside it. No published rate includes what you were actually charged.
A card used abroad
Your bank picks a rate and then usually adds a foreign-transaction fee on top. The fee is part of the price of that coffee, not an administrative detail. The honest rate for a card purchase is what the statement shows against what the slip said.
Neither
If you genuinely have nothing to work from, use a published rate for the day of the purchase rather than today — and treat it as an estimate, because that is what it is.
What to do with it
Two totals, side by side, not one blended one.
Let each currency keep a total of its own. Euros stay euros and add up to a number of euros. That total answers the question a traveller actually asks — what did the trip cost in the money I was spending — and it does so exactly, with no arithmetic anybody can argue with.
The home-currency figure is then a second question rather than a replacement for the first. It is the useful one for the year’s books and the useless one for understanding the trip itself.
This is also what makes a trip readable afterwards. Two weeks of euro receipts, kept in euros, are a picture of those two weeks. The same slips flattened into home currency are a picture of an exchange rate.
A practical note
The exchange itself is not spending.
Changing two hundred dollars into euros is not a two-hundred-dollar expense. You still have the money; it is a different colour. If your books count it as spending and then count the euro receipts as well, the trip costs twice what it cost.
So an exchange belongs in a category of its own, outside the count, and only what you then buy with the money is spending. This catches people out most often with cash taken out at an airport at a terrible rate: the bad rate is a real cost, but it is the cost of the exchange, not of the dinner you eventually bought.
Straight answers
Common questions
Should I convert foreign receipts to my home currency?
Not in place of the original. Keep the receipt in the currency it was printed in, because that figure never changes, and treat the home-currency amount as a second, dated question. Converting everything at today’s rate replaces a fact with an opinion.
What exchange rate should I use?
The one you actually paid, wherever you can work it out: the two sides of an exchange slip, or the card statement against the printed receipt. A published rate is a fallback for when you have nothing better, and it should be the rate for the day of the purchase rather than the day you are filing it.
Does money I exchanged count as spending?
No. Exchanging money moves it between currencies, it does not spend it. Counting the exchange and then counting what you bought with the cash makes the trip look about twice as expensive as it was.
What about the foreign-transaction fee on my card?
It is part of what the purchase cost you. A card rate that looks close to the published one and then carries a percentage on top is not close to the published one, and over a two-week trip the difference is not small.
How do I compare a month with a trip in it to a normal month?
Carefully, or not at all. Two weeks abroad are not two typical weeks, and a month containing them is not a typical month. Look at the trip on its own, in the money you spent, and let your ordinary months be compared with your other ordinary months.
I have receipts from a country I no longer live in. Are they still worth keeping?
Yes, and keeping them in their own currency is what makes them worth anything. They stay exact, they can be read years later without a rate table, and they do not distort the books they sit beside.
Where ExpenseGauge fits
It keeps the money you actually spent.
A trip does not reset your books. In ExpenseGauge a receipt keeps the currency it was printed in, and each currency keeps a total of its own instead of being flattened into one number that was never paid.
An exchange is its own kind of thing rather than a purchase, so it does not double-count a trip — and because an exchange slip carries both sides, the rate it produces is the one you were really charged rather than one from a table.
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