- What it is
- A dated line recording the amount sent in the currency you sent, the same amount in your home currency, and the rate between them.
- How you get one
- Write three figures and a time immediately after confirming a payment, before closing the window that shows them.
- Where to keep it
- With the order record, on the same page, so the note and the thing it describes are never separated.
- How it goes wrong
- It gets written from memory the next day, by which time the rate has moved and the figure is a reconstruction.
- What fails without it
- Any later disagreement about what was sent turns into two parties recalling different numbers with nothing to check against.
- Time to acquire
- Under a minute, taken at the one moment when all the figures are visible at once.
Three figures and a time
The amount in the currency that moved. The equivalent in whatever currency you think in. The rate that connects them. Then the time, to the hour at least, because the rate without a timestamp is a number without a meaning.
That is the whole artifact. It fits on one line of a notebook and takes less time to write than to think about. The reason people skip it is not effort, it is that at the moment of sending the figures feel unforgettable. They are not. They are gone by the weekend.
Why two accounts of the same payment drift apart
A market records a payment against its own view: the amount it expected, the rate it applied, and the moment it credited the balance. Your wallet records something else: the amount that left, the fee it charged, and a home currency figure that many wallets recalculate at today's rate rather than the rate on the day. Look at both a month later and they disagree, sometimes noticeably.
Neither is lying. They are measuring different events at different moments with different conventions. The gap widens with time and with volatility, and it widens most in exactly the period when you are trying to reconstruct what happened. Your note is the fixed point that does not move while the other two accounts drift.
| Whose figure | What it reflects | How it moves later |
|---|---|---|
| The market's | The amount credited and the rate it applied at crediting | Fixed in its records, invisible to you once the page changes |
| Your wallet's | The amount that left, minus its own fee | Home currency value often recalculated at today's rate |
| Your note | What you saw at the moment you confirmed | Does not move, which is the entire point |
Where the note belongs
On the same page as the order record, not in a separate file. A rate note filed on its own is a set of numbers with no subject, and matching it back to an order later is a puzzle you will not enjoy. Written directly beneath the order details it stays self explanatory forever.
Some people keep a running column of these, one line per payment, which doubles as the history that lets them size their margin honestly. That is a reasonable side effect of a habit kept for other reasons.
Reading an old note without misleading yourself
An old note tells you what things looked like then, and that is all it tells you. It is not a valuation of anything today and it does not tell you whether you did well. Reading it as if it were current is the one way this artifact can actively mislead, which is why the timestamp goes on the same line as the figures rather than at the top of the page.
Where old notes genuinely help is in patterns. Payments that consistently arrived tighter than expected. Rates that moved a lot between viewing and confirming. Those observations are only available to somebody who wrote things down at the time.
What the note settles
It settles the simplest and most common dispute, which is not fraud but ambiguity: was the right amount sent. With a dated note and your copy of the deposit address you can state what left, when, at what rate, and where it was aimed. That is a complete account of your side.
Without it you are offering an impression. Impressions do not resolve anything, and the person on the other end has their own impression which differs. The evidence you keep exists for this stage of the story and a rate note is one of its cheaper components.
Questions that come up
My wallet keeps a transaction history already. Is that not enough?
It records what left your wallet, which is genuinely useful, but many wallets display the home currency value at today's rate rather than the rate at the time. That means the figure you see next month is not the figure you saw when you sent. Your own note preserves the moment, and it costs a line of writing to have both.
Why write the home currency figure at all?
Because it is the one you actually reason in, and it is the one that becomes hardest to reconstruct later. Working it out afterwards means finding a historical rate for a specific hour, which is possible and tedious and never quite matches what your wallet showed you. Writing it once at the time removes the whole exercise.
How long should I keep old rate notes?
Keep them at least until the order they belong to is fully settled. Beyond that they cost nothing to retain and become a small private record of how payments have actually behaved for you, which is more useful than any general figure. If you retire them, retire them along with the order material rather than on their own.