When I started thinking about cash in Adjustibl, I assumed it would be fairly straightforward. Track what comes in, subtract what goes out, and keep a balance for each currency.
But a balance only tells you how much money you have. It doesn’t tell you what that money cost you.
That difference matters when you invest in another currency.
Imagine you buy USD 400 for CAD $520. A few months later, those same US dollars are worth CAD $600, and you use all of them to buy shares.
You haven’t sold a single share. You haven’t converted anything back to Canadian dollars. Yet the currency you just spent has gained CAD $80 in value.
The shares start with a cost of CAD $600. The $80 belongs to the currency you held before buying them. These are separate calculations, even though they happen in the same purchase.
That example assumes a non-registered investment account, capital treatment and no fees. The $80 is the currency gain before annual reporting adjustments. The CRA’s foreign currency guidance explains how those gains and losses are reported.
This is why tracking only the stock purchases and sales leaves something out. When you eventually sell the shares and receive USD, that cash starts another period of ownership. Its Canadian-dollar value can change again before you spend it.
Then there’s borrowing. My own account’s cash balance goes negative at times, so this couldn’t be something we simply rejected and left for later.
At first, I thought we could combine the balances. If one account has USD 1,000 and another owes USD 1,000, isn’t that effectively zero?
It is zero net cash. But spending the money in the first account doesn’t repay the second account’s debt. You still owe those dollars, and the exchange rate when you repay them matters. One combined number hides that distinction.
The practical lesson for me is that cash history deserves the same attention as investment history. Deposits, withdrawals, conversions and borrowing all help explain where the numbers came from. Even moving money between your own accounts means keeping track of its original cost.
You don’t necessarily need to import every transaction you’ve ever made. A reliable opening balance, together with its historical CAD value, gives you somewhere to start.
That’s what I want Adjustibl to make easier: understanding the result without having to work through all this yourself. Buying the right stocks is enough work. Keeping track of the dollars used to buy them should be easier.