Your Tokyo ramen did not get cheaper last night
Here is a small dishonesty most expense trackers commit every single day: you buy a bowl of ramen in Tokyo in March, record it, and then — as the exchange rate drifts through the year — the app quietly changes what that bowl “cost” you. Open it in November and your March trip is suddenly cheaper, or dearer, than the trip you actually took.
Nothing about March changed. Only the number did.
A receipt is a fact, not a quote
The moment you paid, the price became history: this many yen, on that date. Converting it into ringgit or dollars is fine — useful, even — but the honest conversion is the one that answers the question you’re actually asking: what was that worth when I bought it?
That has one correct answer, and it is pinned to the receipt’s own date. Using today’s rate instead answers a different question — “what would this cost if I bought it again right now?” — which is almost never what you meant, and which changes every day. A ledger whose past keeps moving is not a record; it is a mood.
It also breaks arithmetic you might rely on. If your October total once said RM 1,240 and the app later recalculates it to RM 1,310, which number goes in the expense report you already filed? Historical-rate conversion is the only way totals stay stable after you’ve written them down.
How Pip does it
Pip converts using the European Central Bank’s reference rate for the receipt’s date — published once per working day, free for anyone to verify. Three rules keep it honest:
- The original amount is never discarded. ¥1,200 stays ¥1,200 forever; the conversion sits beside it, labelled with its rate and date.
- The conversion never silently updates. Once a receipt is saved, its converted value is a fact like the rest of it.
- No rate means no conversion. The ECB publishes nothing on weekends and holidays, and not every currency is covered. When there is no rate for a date, Pip shows the original amount and says so — it does not borrow Friday’s rate and hope. An invented number is worse than a missing one.
The test for any travel-expense tool
Record something in a foreign currency, wait a month, and look at it again.
If the number moved, the app is quoting you, not keeping your books. You deserve a ledger with a memory — one where a bowl of ramen costs what it cost, forever.
What that looks like across a whole trip — one wallet per journey, both amounts kept on every receipt — is on the receipts for travel page.
That is the ledger Pip keeps: every receipt converted at its own day’s rate, with the original amount never overwritten. Get it on the App Store.