Foreign currency accounts not visible in mobile app

wayne186

I travel a lot to foreign countries and I have a cash account for each currency in my quicken data file but there is no way to add transactions as they occur manually when I am traveling for example when using the quicken mobile app. Cash accounts are not able to be viewed or edited within the mobile app for foreign currencies(https://www.quicken.com/support/can-i-sync-multiple-currency-accounts-quicken-mobile) and I am obviously not going to pull open my laptop to view and enter data into the desktop version every time I buy a delicious bowl of thai noodles or something from a street vendor or pay cash for a short taxi or moped ride who does not give receipts. Currently the only way to keep track is to add the transaction in my notes app and then manually enter hundreds of entries when I sit down in front of the laptop. I even looked at maybe using google sheets on my smartphone and then import into quicken but the csv format to import into quicken is by row so a simple single entry can take 10 lines or so. I cannot find any solutions that work that avoid me spending hours in front of the desktop version after the trip. Does anybody have any ideas or apps that I can use to integrate?

Quicken Anja

Hello @wayne186,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community with your question.

Unfortunately, as you said, Quicken Mobile does not currently offer syncing of accounts using foreign currency.

Therefore, I'd like to refer you to this active Idea post regarding this topic instead which is currently marked as Planned. If you would like to be notified of updates on this feature as they become available, you can go ahead and bookmark the thread by clicking the bookmark icon in the top-right corner.

Our Development and Product teams frequently use our idea posts in order to improve Quicken and implement new features requested by customers. 

I hope this helps!

wayne186

Anja, waiting for your development team to make this possible is not going to help me in the short term. I have been fighting with this for many years and I noticed that your link you sent is from 2017. SO that is 5 years that you have been aware of this problem and still no solution. This will push me away from Quicken as I spend more and more time in foreign countries and I cannot spend my days manually inserting data from a simple notepad. There must be a way to add transactions in an app or spreadsheet and then import into quicken or something. The csv import is not possible due to the format of a csv file that quicken demands. 5 years is enough time to develop a solution. Why is it not there already?

Paul_

Hi @wayne186,

I'm not familiar with the csv format that Quicken is expecting for input, but perhaps you or someone with Quicken can make an Excel (or Google) spreadsheet that uses one tab for easy data entry and another tab for formatting for export to csv? Depending on format, this might require the use of macros / Visual Basic or perhaps you can just brute-force it with a bunch of equations.

wayne186

Paul, I am just a customer of Quicken and although I have experience with Quicken I do not have enough experience to create macro's which is what it would need. Typically when I am traveling I will use a notepad on my smartphone and in the first 'column' I put the date then next column is amount and next is payee and next is a comment so that is 4 columns and each date entry is a row. When you look at the import or export of a csv file into quicken you will see that each entry is by row and only one column so one data entry in my example is 4 rows. This is what a simple cash register looks like when you export as a QIF file and if there was a way to take each cell in the columns then you could create a QIF file to import.

!Type:Cash
D1/ 1'23
U0.00
T0.00
POpening Balance
L[Import_Test]
^
D1/ 1'23
U1,916.22
T1,916.22
PATM
Mimport test
L[Cash Account]
^
D1/ 2'23
U-100.00
T-100.00
C*
PDiiner
Mcoffee
L1Employment:Own Inc:Food & Incidental/Own+FOOD
^
D1/ 2'23
U-200.00
T-200.00
CX
PFlight
Mflight
L1Employment:Trident:Travel/TRIDENT+TRANSPORT
^

So here you can see that 7 rows are created for a single entry. Everything below the ^ character is a transaction in the register.

D is the date so D1/ 1'23 is 01st January 2023.
U1 and T1 designates a receivable and a U- and T- designates a spend.
P is payee,
M is comment and
L is Category followed by a / is the Tag

This would be a total butt ache to write in a notepad app due to the formatting of the QIF file. If there was a way to make a spreadsheet macro that you could create 7 columns an populate them during your travels and then on your return you run a macro to convert from 7 columns to 7 rows then you could import. I might look into seeing if I can do it at some point but why? We as users should not wait over 5 years for a company like Quicken to give us what is perfectly reasonable and very much needed method to allow us to enter data as we travel. It is so hard to keep track the way that I do and it amounts to atleast a full day of data entry when I return from a trip. It is tedious and unnecessary.

plfan126

Hi Wayne,

I have been chasing them for implementing this functionality but no result.

As a fix I just create a Travel Account Register in USD which is visible in the mobile app and enter my transactions there. When i get on my desktop i just move the transactions to the appropriate account.

Hope that helps.

Lawrence

wayne186

interesting workaround Lawrence. I just tried that by setting up a 'TravelStaging' cash account and then syncing with my mobile. I then added a couple of transactions and was able to pull from my categories and tags easily inside the app and then after syncing my desktop version I was able to move US based currency transactions in that travel staging account right into a foreign currency cash account with no problem. This will make things a lot easier so thanks so much. It was interesting to note that $60 in say the USD cash account when moved simply stays as 60 in the foreign transaction account so it is not even trying to convert the currency which is perfect so now I simply enter my transactions in the local currency and then move them later without having to worry about conversion factors in the data move between accounts. A flaw that serves us well for this workaround :) massive help, thanks so much and I will be using this method moving forward