Difference between travelspend and bank account

#1

We’ve been using travelspend for 5 months now. The app is great for keeping track of everything we spend. However on a total sum of about 15000 euro in Travelspend, our actual spendings are actually over 16000 when checking our bank account. Oops… We might have forgotten some small things but we are very strict with registering everything.

It seems that the biggest issue is exchange rates and bank costs for transactions and atm’s. As an example 120.000 Costa Rican Colones are listed as 170 euro in Travelspend, while our bank lists it as 175 euro. Quite a big difference…

I was wondering how you dealt with this during your trips? And maybe it would be possible to add a certain user defined percentage on top of all currency exchange rates, to cover for this?

Right now I can’t think of any solution except for just adding a fixed amount of costs per day, or lowering the overall budgets.

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#2

For something you simple did not log into TravelSpend, I agree, I guess there is no way around than to do some sort of chargeback by spreading the cost to the daily expenses, yeah.

However, you did make me think of a similar problem. I own three credit cards, of which thereof two have no banking fees for foreign currencies. (However if the foreign bank imposes its own fees on an ATM, there’s no way around it, so I do have a specific category for banking fees in my app) But one cards uses a flat 1.75% fee on each transaction carried out in foreign currency. I was thinking of maybe such given quota to be added to the settings, so all credit card related spending gets that percentage added on top. Fancier way might even be to add the option to enter multiple cards with different fees, but that’s a bit to fancy now and shooting for the moon I guess.

So yeah, the whole currency exchange rate topic is not easy. However, as a workaround for now, I just simply add the fees directly to each expense.

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