When your bank charges more
You paid 3000 RON in Bucharest with your euro card. MonVa shows about €603. Your bank statement says €612. Neither number is wrong — they answer different questions.
What each number means
| Number | What it is | |
|---|---|---|
| In MonVa | ≈ €603.62 | 3000 RON converted at the daily reference rate (4.9700) |
| On your statement | €612.37 | What your bank actually took, at its own rate (4.8990) |
| Difference | €8.75 | ≈ 1.45% — your card’s foreign-exchange margin |
MonVa always keeps the real amount you paid — 3000 RON. The euro figure next to it is a convenience conversion, which is exactly what the ≈ sign means.
Why we can’t show your bank’s rate
We’d love to. It isn’t available to us, for three separate reasons:
- The rate isn’t set when you pay. Your card network applies its rate when the transaction settles, usually one to three days later. At the moment you tap the terminal, the final euro amount doesn’t exist yet — not for us, and not for your bank’s app either.
- Every issuer adds its own margin, typically between 0.5% and 3%. There is no public feed of per-bank margins, and the same card can charge differently on different currency pairs.
- If you chose “pay in EUR” at the terminal, the merchant’s payment provider picked the rate, not your bank. That’s Dynamic Currency Conversion, and its markup is usually 3–7%. Declining it — always paying in the local currency — is the single easiest way to spend less.
Making a transaction exact
When the charge lands in your bank statement and you want your MonVa balance to match it to the cent, open the transaction and edit it:
- Open the transaction and tap Edit.
- Change the currency to your card’s currency — EUR in this example.
- Enter the amount your bank actually took — 612.37.
- Put the original price in the note, so it isn’t lost: “3000 RON”.
Your account balance now matches your statement exactly.
This is a trade-off, so it’s worth doing deliberately: the amount field can hold one currency at a time, so entering the euro figure replaces the RON one. That’s why the note matters — it keeps the price you actually saw on the terminal.
When it doesn’t matter
Most of the time you can leave it alone:
- You’re spending in the same currency as the account — no conversion, no gap.
- You’re looking at categories and trends rather than reconciling to the cent. A ~1.5% margin doesn’t change which category you overspent in.
- The amounts are small. On a €4 coffee the difference is six cents.
Reconciling is worth the effort on the large ones: rent, flights, a car rental deposit, a laptop bought abroad.
What’s coming
Overwriting the original amount isn’t a great answer, and we know it. We’re working on a dedicated field for the amount your account was really debited, so you’ll be able to record both — the 3000 RON you paid and the €612.37 your bank took — without either one being lost. Once enough of those are recorded, MonVa will be able to tell you what your card actually costs you in foreign exchange, measured from your own spending rather than from a bank’s brochure.