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cjhowald / ynab-csv

Tool for making your CSV files ready to import into YNAB
MIT License
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Currency conversion #10

Open ohthehugemanatee opened 7 years ago

ohthehugemanatee commented 7 years ago

Add a dialog to choose a source and destination currency, and automatically do the conversion for the average rate on the date of each transaction.

cjhowald commented 7 years ago

What's the use case for this? Deutsche bank always converts the money right away (you can't withdraw dollars from an account with euros). So, purchases from a foreign currency are already converted, plus any charges, etc. Seems like any attempt for this tool to convert would be unlikely to be 100% accurate, which would just cause more issues on import into YNAB. What do you think?

ohthehugemanatee commented 7 years ago

The use case is to support accounts in multiple currencies - anyone with a bank account in a currency other than their primary. For example, I have a US bank account and an EU one. I live in the EU, so my YNAB "primary currency" is €. My US account is denominated in USD. If I want to have both bank accounts on YNAB, I have to do the conversion from USD to EUR before import.

The inaccuracy thing isn't much of an issue TBH. Between the bank's markup, and normal variance from the average rate, I just expect about a 5% fudge factor for my final account balance when I import/reconcile. It works well, since a secondary-currency account is almost by definition a secondary account. If your YNAB primary currency doesn't match your primary account, you're either Doing It Wrong, or Too Complicated For A Personal Budgeting Tool.

cjhowald commented 7 years ago

I understand your point now. I'm in the same situation, living in the EU with accounts in the US. My currency is €, but I just pretend all my accounts are in €. This is a bit inaccurate for the US accounts, but the € and $ aren't that far apart these days. Converting currency before import would lead to a more accurate overall total, but you wouldn't be able to really reconcile those accounts, since the totals would never match. I rely on those final numbers matching to know I'm up to date and that the import was successful, so this is a deal breaker for me.

That said, I probably won't work on implementing this feature. But feel free to make a fork or open a PR.

ohthehugemanatee commented 7 years ago

Yep, I created the issue as a placeholder. Looking forward to writing a pr. Any recommendation on a docker or vagrant environment that should be able to build it?

On Fri, Jan 27, 2017, 6:34 PM Colin Howald notifications@github.com wrote:

I understand your point now. I'm in the same situation, living in the EU with accounts in the US. My currency is €, but I just pretend all my accounts are in €. This is a bit inaccurate for the US accounts, but the € and $ aren't that far apart these days. Converting currency before import would lead to a more accurate overall total, but you wouldn't be able to really reconcile those accounts, since the totals would never match. I rely on those final numbers matching to know I'm up to date and that the import was successful, so this is a deal breaker for me.

That said, I probably won't work on implementing this feature. But feel free to make a fork or open a PR.

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