My home currency is INR. I built Pocket Clear specifically because I wanted my own money tracked in rupees, in my own app, without a bank in the loop. So when I landed in Europe for a two-week trip earlier this year, I assumed logging expenses would be the easiest part of the whole thing. I use the app every day. I know exactly where the Add Transaction button is. I was wrong about how easy it would be — not because the app didn't work, but because of what I was doing to myself before I even opened it.
The first coffee
My first morning in Lisbon, I bought a coffee and a pastry for €3.80. I pulled out my phone to log it, opened Pocket Clear, and stopped. The amount field wanted rupees. I had euros. So I did what felt like the obvious thing: I multiplied 3.80 by roughly 90 in my head — call it ₹340 — and typed that in.
It took maybe fifteen seconds. That doesn't sound like much. But fifteen seconds of mental arithmetic, standing at a counter with a barista waiting and a friend already walking toward the door, is a different fifteen seconds than fifteen seconds sitting at your desk. I got the number roughly right. I also immediately understood that I was going to do this same fifteen seconds of math dozens of times a day for two weeks, and that most of the time I wasn't going to bother.
Where it actually broke
By day three, the pattern was exactly what I'd have predicted if I'd thought about it in advance instead of after landing:
- I stopped logging small things. A €2 tram ticket wasn't worth the mental math, so I told myself I'd "remember it later." I didn't.
- I batched logging at the end of the day — from memory, from a fistful of receipts, converting each one cold, hours after the fact and with a rough exchange rate I was no longer confident in.
- The rate itself drifted in my head. I started the trip converting at roughly ₹90 per euro. By the second week I was using a number I'd half-remembered from a currency app I'd glanced at once, which was already a few days stale.
- My actual spending record for the trip was, honestly, not that accurate. Which is a strange thing to admit as the founder of an expense tracking app — but it's exactly why the feature exists now.
The irony wasn't lost on me. I'd built a whole product around the idea that tracking should take seconds, not minutes — and here I was, defeated by currency arithmetic on my own trip, using my own app.
The fix was obvious once I framed the problem correctly
The mistake wasn't that I needed to get better at mental math, or that I needed a currency converter app open in a second window. The mistake was asking myself to do a job the software should be doing. I wasn't supposed to convert €3.80 to rupees. I was supposed to type "3.80" and let the app know I meant euros.
That's the entire idea behind Travel Mode. You pick your travel currency once — for me, on that trip, it would have been EUR the moment I landed in Lisbon. From then on, the Add Transaction amount field accepts euros directly. Type 3.80, see a live preview of what that is in rupees underneath as you type, and save. The transaction gets stored in rupees, same as every other transaction in my account, so my reports back home never see anything unusual — they just see a coffee that cost about ₹340, correctly, without me doing arithmetic at a counter in Lisbon.
Nothing about my home currency changes. My budgets, my categories, my monthly reports — all still in rupees, exactly as before the trip. Travel Mode only changes what the input box understands while I'm away, and it changes back the moment I turn it off, or automatically prompts me to when my phone notices I'm back in an INR timezone.
What I'd tell past-me, standing at that counter in Lisbon
Don't convert it. Type the number you're looking at. Let the phone do the multiplication it's obviously better at than you are, especially at 8am with a queue behind you and a euro coin you're not sure is worth what you think it's worth. That's the whole feature, and it exists because I needed it on a trip I took myself, tracking my own money, in my own app — which is, I think, exactly how a feature like this should get built.
— Aravind
Try Travel Mode on Your Next Trip
Enter expenses in local currency, saved automatically in yours. Pro feature, works offline.