How currency conversion works
Your accounts can each be in their own currency. Euros and pounds don’t add up on their own, so whenever Quidough shows you a combined figure it converts everything into one currency first. What you recorded stays exactly as you recorded it.
Your base currency
That one currency is your household’s base currency. You choose it when you set up your household, and you can change it later in Settings, under Household.
Changing it shows every balance, report and budget in the new currency, for everyone in the household. Your transactions aren’t touched, and you can switch back any time.
What you recorded is never replaced
Converting happens on the way to a combined figure, and only there. An account always shows its balance in its own currency, written the way that currency is normally written: €1,234.56, or ¥1,200 for the ones that don’t use cents. That’s the figure you’d recognize from your statement, and Quidough doesn’t quietly turn it into something else.
The one place you’ll see both at once is the savings breakdown in Insights. Each account lists what it moved that month in its own currency, with the equivalent in your base currency underneath in smaller text, marked with a ≈ because it comes from a rate rather than from anything you typed.
Each amount uses the rate from its own day
A conversion uses the rate from the day the money moved, not today’s. Last year’s spending converts at last year’s rates, so a report on a past month reads the same next year as it does now.
Weekends and holidays have no rate of their own, so those days use the most recent one before them.
Transfers carry the rate you used
A transfer between accounts in different currencies is the one case where the rate is yours rather than Quidough’s. You enter both sides: what left one account, and what landed in the other. Quidough works the rate out from those two numbers, shows it under the field, and keeps both amounts exactly as you typed them.
That’s your bank’s rate on the day with whatever it charged you already in it, which is truer to what happened than any published rate. Nothing goes back and corrects it later.
Where the rates come from
Quidough takes its exchange rates from the European Central Bank and updates them once a day on its own. There’s nothing to refresh and nothing to set up. While you’re reading a screen the rates hold still, so figures don’t shift under you halfway through; open it again and you have the fresh ones.
Once in a while an amount can’t be converted at all. Quidough leaves that one out of the total and tells you it has, rather than filling the gap with a guess. The note goes away for the day if you dismiss it.
A rate moving isn’t money moving
If some of your money sits in another currency, what it’s worth in yours drifts as rates move. Nobody deposited or spent anything. Your insights explains where that shows up, and why the savings line can fall in a month you added to.