Foreign currency accounts for YNAB.
Manage multiple currency accounts in a single budget in You Need A Budget.
This app is not a part of the official You Need A Budget product.
Features
Some notable features of this app that set it apart from other solutions (such using separate budgets for different currencies, the YNAB Multi-Currency app, or the Currency Converter for YNAB app):
- All your accounts, both local and foreign currency, are in a single budget so you can see the state of all your finances at a glance.
- Auto-import, manual import, and reconciliation for foreign currency accounts works normally, in the original foreign currency.
- Reports and net worth will always be shown in your local currency, with all foreign amounts converted at an exchange rate accurate to within 24 hours.
- Budget categories are in your local currency, and it's no problem to mix local and foreign currency transactions in the same budget category.
- Split transactions are converted correctly.
- Foreign currency balances are automatically adjusted as the currency fluctuates, at an exchange rate accurate to within 24 hours.
- Your original transactions left are untouched.
- Uses historical exchange rates for transactions in the past.
- Processes transactions continuously; you should see converted transactions within five minutes.
Testimonials
“Just brilliant! It is so much easier now to reconcile my foreign accounts, which were quite a pain before.”
“I tested different workflows, like changing the category of a foreign transaction after the diff transaction was added, as well as removing a foreign transaction, and in all cases your tool takes care of it perfectly.
Thank you so much for making this seamless tool. As someone who lives in two currencies, it has made YNAB so much more useful and easy to use.”
“This is brilliant. Thank you so much. […] I live in NZ but I still have accounts in the US and have long been managing everything in a pair of YNAB4 budgets. Having everything in one budget while still tracking my US accounts in USD...amaaaazing!”
— Eniariom
“Well done. You've gone beyond the "easy" part (transaction entry) and tackled the primary barrier of mixing foreign currencies in a zero-based budget -- the ever changing equivalent values of what's in the foreign accounts.”
Approach
This is based on an approach that I've been using manually for several years and found to work very well for our family budget which crosses three different currencies and involves a lot of foreign transactions and transfers (after trying a few other ways first).
The approach boils down to:
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Transactions in foreign currency accounts are kept in their original foreign currencies, so imports and reconciliation work as they should.
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For each foreign currency in the budget, there is a "virtual" difference account that holds the difference between your total holdings in the foreign currency and your those holdings converted to your local currency.
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For each transaction in a foreign currency account, a corresponding transaction is created in the difference account with the difference between the foreign amount and the amount converted to your local currency (at the exchange rate of the day before the transaction's date).
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Adjustment transactions are created daily in the difference account to account for fluctuating exchange rates, with a special budget category used as a "buffer" for these fluctuations.
For example, if
- your local currency is U.S. Dollars
- you hold €100.00, and
- €1.00 = $1.10, then
the Euro difference account would hold $10.00, since
- €100.00 * $1.10/€1.00 = $110
- the difference ($110 - $100) is $10.
If you create a €10.00 transaction, a corresponding transaction for $1.00, with the same payee and category, will be created in the Euro difference account in order to keep its balance correct.
Limitations
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This approach assumes you have a "home" currency that you use for your budgeting. It's probably the currency where you live most of the time and do the majority of your spending, but it could be the currency that you earn most of your money in. If you split your time evenly between countries or are truly global, you may not have a single "home" in this sense, in which case you may be better off maintaining separate budgets for your different home currencies.
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This app doesn't help you out if you're spending in a foreign currency using a local currency account (e.g. using a U.S. credit card while visiting Europe), since there's no way to know what rate your financial institution will use for transactions.
For more detailed information, open the help documentation.