I have tried to make Trip Wallet an easy application to use, but if you find any bugs, issues or have suggestions, feel free to get in touch.
Setup
There are only a couple of steps to set the application up:
- Set your budget. This is in your home currency.
- Set your home currency, that is, the currency of the country you live in. If you are from the United States, you would select USD (US Dollar)).
- Add one or more currencies for places you are going to visit, and their exchange rates. You may also want to add your home currency (with a rate of 1.0) so you can log anything you do before you leave.
- Set the start and end date of your trip.
- Enjoy your trip!
- Once you are finished with the trip, send the items you have recorded to your email account (or someone elses!), and reset the application for the next trip.
For example, if I live in the UK and I’m going to the US and New Zealand, with a budget of £6000.00, I would use:
- Home currency: GBP (Pounds)
- Budget: 6000.00
- Currencies: USD (1.5 USD = 1 GBP), NZD (2.05 NZD = 1 GBP) and GBP (1.0 GBP = 1 GBP)
Tips
- I’ve found that recording every transaction is not practical, especially cash transactions. So I record cash I take out of an ATM as “spent” on that day, and ignore it when I spend the cash.
- The idea is to get a feel for how you are doing against your budget, not a penny-by-penny account of your trip. Rounding items up to the nearest unit (dollar, dinah etc) is a good idea.
- A few cents difference in the exchange rate isn’t going to mean much unless you are spending 1000′s at a time, so no need to change the exchange rate every day.
- The exchange rate is stored against each entry, so changing the rate will not change any existing entries.
If you have any problems, feel free to get in touch.
