How Lunch Money handles multiple currencies: primary currency, conversion and reports

Three ideas behind the design

Lunch Money separates where money lives from how it is reported. Each transaction and account carries its own currency; one primary currency is used for every total, summary, chart and budget. Conversion happens at the date of each transaction rather than at today's rate, so last spring's euro rent is not revalued every time the exchange rate moves.

That design suits households that earn, spend or save in more than one currency and want one set of totals. It is different from apps that convert everything at a single current rate, and it has consequences for how month-to-month comparisons look, covered in the worked example below.

This is research from official pages read on 30 October 2026, not firsthand testing. We have not opened these accounts or run the features described; help pages change, so confirm the live page before you rely on a detail.

Setting it up

• Choose a primary currency in Settings. Lunch Money says all totals and summaries are displayed in it and that it can be changed at any time.
• Enable the extra currencies you use under Settings, Details, Supported Currencies. Once more than one is enabled, editable amount fields show a currency dropdown. Removing a currency from the list does not change existing transactions in it.
• For synced accounts whose amounts arrive in the wrong currency, use Override synced currency on the account.
• For CSV imports, set the transactions' currency under Additional settings in the first step.
• If a currency is missing from the 160-plus supported, the documentation says to email support to request it.

Worked example: a USD and EUR household

This is an invented household with USD as primary currency, a US checking account and a euro account used for a flat in Lisbon. The exchange rates below are illustrative, not quotes. In October the euro account pays rent of 1,200 euros on 3 October and utilities of 150 euros on 20 October; a US salary of $6,000 arrives on 1 October.

Because each transaction converts at its own date's rate, the rent shows at about $1,320 if the euro was worth $1.10 that day, and the utilities at about $172.50 if it had risen to $1.15 by the 20th. October's housing total in the budget is the sum of those converted amounts, about $1,492.50. The euro account itself still shows its balance in euros.

Budgets, net worth and reports

Budget summaries, account summaries, charts and all other totals are shown in the primary currency. The consequence for budgeting is that a fixed euro bill can look slightly over or under a USD budget line purely because of exchange-rate movement; in the example, the same 1,200 euro rent is $1,320 at 1.10 and $1,380 at 1.15. Leave a small margin on foreign-currency budget lines, or review them in the original currency before deciding you overspent.

Net worth is calculated monthly from the account balances recorded for each period, with balances in other currencies converted to the primary currency at the historical conversion rate for that date. Lunch Money says the tracker does not automatically backfill from historical transactions, so start the euro account's balance history when you add it.

What the documentation does not say

These points were not covered on the pages we read, so test them with a few transactions before relying on them.

Who this suits and who should look elsewhere

It suits people who want one set of totals in a home currency with each foreign transaction valued at the rate on the day it happened, such as expats, cross-border couples and anyone holding savings abroad. It suits less well if you want budgets set and tracked in a second currency, which the pages we read do not document. Our multi-currency roundup compares how other apps handle this.