"travel money card"

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Alex Mair
Alex Mair Member Posts: 3 ✭
edited July 2019 in Personal Plus and Home & Business
Travel money cards allow multiple currencies to be held against the card.  The card is loaded with an amount of foreign currency and this may be several currencies depending on the area being travelled.  Mine has USD, GBP EURO, NZD.  I am running Quicken 2012 personal and find that I can only account in a single currency.  In fact the exchange rate is irrelevant, because once the foreign currency is loaded that value stays - it is not an AUD value that will vary - variance only occurs when loading.

Can the software account for teh various currencies or should I be using a work arround such as having several accounts in Quicken for the same card - each with a difference currency?

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  • John Campbell
    John Campbell Member Posts: 193 ✭✭
    edited February 2017
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    Alex,

    My daughter is travelling with one of these multi-currency debit cards and I am trying to monitor the transactions in a spread sheet. I am finding it a challenge.

    Each currency has a "bucket".

    Some transactions can sometimes be posted in a different currency to the currency of that bucket, sometimes split between buckets, sometimes without fees and sometimes with fees. Confusion reigns when some buckets become empty.

    Currency conversion rates also vary with time, so I was looking to have a lookup table of conversion rates, although these rates vary depending if there is a real or virtual conversion.

    Unfortunately, there is not sufficient detail provided to track these conversions.

    I would recommend you try to set up a multi-currency spread sheet to monitor the type of transactions that occur, both between currencies and between buckets. You need to think laterally to get there. There does appear to be some logic to it and I did get close, but still out by 1-2%. It did help to understand what types of transfer transactions can be applied.

    I am not surprised that RPP can not do this.

    In the end, I found it too hard. I eventually concluded my problem is not trying to monitor the transactions but actually trying to stop them !! There were holes in the buckets !!

    John

  • Malincan
    Malincan Member Posts: 13 ✭✭
    edited December 2016
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    Alex

    I like and use the idea of setting up notional 'cards' for each of the currencies and entering the transactions in the relevant 'card' .  This is what I do in most instances though for me there are only $AUD, $US and RMB.  

    The transfers that occur between each 'card' and the funding source, either external or between the 'card' currencies, I post to a currency exchange account so that each 'card' currency has pure transactions only.  

    Like John there are always differences caused by exchange rates, fees and charges, commissions etc.  I don't try and resolve those as it is not that material. In fact I manually enter an exchange rate for each currency based on the initial funding rates and do not change that for the trip.

    Try it out with an $AUD and say $US and process some testing transactions so you are confident it will suite your needs in a copy of your DB.  Not too many, they can always be deleted if you don't like the results.

    And there is always the spreadsheet if you need more detail and accuracy.

    Malcolm 


  • st_6872571
    st_6872571 Member Posts: 79 ✭
    edited June 2018
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    Malincan, you beat me to the punch, I was going to suggest creating virtual accounts per foreign currency, what you refer to as 'notional' cards.    I do this with Paypal, I've got AUD, US & UK virtual Paypal accounts but only one real/physical Paypal account.
  • Alex Mair
    Alex Mair Member Posts: 3 ✭
    edited March 2016
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    Thanks to all.  I have created the dummy card accounts and it now all works fine.  Fortunately CBA provides a balance for each currency so I can reconcile each one - just have to do it 4 times instead of once, but no big deal.  I can transfer money from an AUD account to any of the others.  It calculates on the updated exchange rate, but I can also enter the actual foreign currency and the right amount comes out and goes in like a 'normal' transfer.

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