[moneydance] FX Rates

[A J R Bayer]

As far as I understand it, the rates that MD (or any other program that has a forex feature) uses is what is called the interbank rate or mid rate. It is roughly equivalent to the average of your bank's TT and Demand Draft  buying and selling rates. As pointed out below, the bank adds on a percentage - often around 1 to 2% so that they make some money on the deal. On top of that they may charge service fees for the privilege of handling your business.

To make matters worse, some banks use one particular rate all day, some revise their rates a couple of times a date, and others use a dynamic rate taken from the current market conditions. You will never know the rate until the transaction is actually done. No personal finance program is going to be able to accommodate that. The way you get the effective rate if you do not know it is to divide one of the currencies by the other when you enter it.

I think we have to be real here.

One exception where you might be given the rate is when you download credit card transactions. Some banks do include the ROE in the information given with the trader.

Anthony



On Saturday, July 22, 2006, at 07:07AM, Steve Nunez <md at illation.com.sg> wrote:

>Indeed this would be a very convenient feature. Even if you know the
>exchange rate, it's rare that you get exactly that amount in the other
>account; each bank has it's own charges, fees, rates, etc. Doing this would
>give you an "effective" FX rate.
>
>Ideally we could keep track of these so that we could compare banks and see
>who's giving the best rates, but I'd be happy with what's described below.
>
>    - Steve
>
>On 22/7/06 5:44 AM, "Johann Beda" <st-moneydance.com at beda.ca> wrote:
>
>> What I would like would be the ability to just fill in those two numbers
>> (1.55 and 2.66) in the two fields directly and have the exchange number be
>> calculated rather than now when you need to fill in the 1.55 transaction
>> amount and then enter the correct exchange rate to get 2.66.
>
>
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