Saturday, October 31, 2015

Quicken Discovery

I have been using Quicken for my personal finances for about 20 years now. For travel, I have always used a general 'Cash' account to track cash spending using the same account for whichever country I am in, converting the currency I am using to CAN with every transaction. I estimate the amounts and once every week or two I reconcile what I have in my pocket with what Quicken says I should have. It is always within a few dollars so I just change a large cash purchase (usually groceries or dining) to make it balance. Close enough.

Yesterday I was playing in the Google sandbox and discovered Quicken offers multi-currency support! I set up two new accounts, 'Cash (US Dollar)' and 'Cash (MX Peso)', told quicken which currency I wanted to use in each and presto! Quicken communicated with the MotherShip for the current exchange rate and is now tracking my spending in the currency of each country at the appropriate exchange rate! When I ask for a report, on say, how much I have spent on gas, it converts the amounts back to CAN dollars within the report. I will still have to do a reconciliation once in a while but it should be pennies (pesos) instead of dollars. Life is Better!

7 comments:

  1. Nice to see another old guy keeping up with technology. Life is indeed better.

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  2. Nice! That sounds pretty cool. We'll have to check it out. Thanks for the tip.

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    Replies
    1. Start here. https://quicken.intuit.com/support/help/account-transaction-issues/how-to-setup-quicken-to-use-multiple-currencies/GEN82303.html

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  3. Sorry but I have no idea what you are taking about but I AM glad that you are happy.

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