Three problems every Notion finance tracker hits. All three, solved.

If you track your money in Notion, you either built your own finance tracker or you duplicated one. And it works. Right up until you hit the limit.

There are three of them, and everyone hits all three eventually.

You start earning or spending in more than one currency, and now you have no idea what your real balance is. You pause a subscription, start it again later on a different plan, maybe pause it again, and every total you had is wrong. You want a different budget this month than last month, so you overwrite the number and lose the history.

I spent the last year building the answer to those three. This is what came out of it.

1. Multiple currencies, and you make them yourself

Open FB7 and go to accounts, and the first thing you will notice is that there is no Notion currency property anywhere.

That is deliberate. Notion's built-in currency has two problems. You can only pick one per property, and sometimes your currency is not even on the list. Mine is not.

So in FB7 you create your own. Go to the Control Room, open currencies, and make as many as you want. One, three, twenty, it does not matter.

Each one gets a name, a colour that some of the formulas read so things stay visually separated, a symbol, and a checkbox marking it as your main currency. Then in your profile you set that main currency and tick the multiple currency box. Using one currency only? Leave it unticked and the whole system just runs on yours.

Now your income, expenses, bills and subscriptions each carry their own currency. Not the database's currency. Their own.

Input and output

This is the part worth understanding, because the whole system hangs off it.

Inputs are the things you log. Income, expenses, subscriptions. Each one takes a single currency, and it should match the account it touches, because money that landed in a euro account is euros.

Outputs are the things that read back. Your month, your year, your profile, your pulses. Those take as many currencies as you want. Select USD and EUR on a month and you see both, in and out, side by side. Select nothing and it falls back to your main currency, which is exactly why you set one.

Why there is no exchange rate API

I get asked this a lot, so here is the honest answer.

You are tracking money after it moves. If a client pays you $1,000 and €920 lands in your bank, you already know the real number. It is sitting in your banking app. A live rate would have given you something close but wrong, because the rate changes every second and the one that mattered was the one at the moment of transfer.

So you type what actually arrived. It is more accurate than any API, and it keeps the template from needing a paid integration just to open.

2. A subscription tracker that survives what you do to it

This is the part I am most proud of, because no finance tracker handles it and everybody needs it.

Most trackers give you a name, a price and a renewal date. That describes a subscription that never changes, and yours change constantly.

In FB7 you change the status. That is all you ever do. Automations in the background handle the rest.

Pause it, come back months later

Here is the exact case from the walkthrough. A $19 a month subscription.

You subscribe in January. You cancel on 8 February, two days before the next bill. You change your mind and subscribe again on 12 April.

FB7 says you have paid $114 this year. That is $19 × 6, which is January plus April through August. February and March are not in there, because you were not paying. And your next cycle now reads 12 September, not the old 10th, because the restart moved your anchor.

You did not calculate any of that. You flipped a status.

Change the price mid-life

You upgrade to a bigger plan in June, from $19 to $50. Change the cost, tick Price Changed, done.

January, April and May stay at $19. June, July and August bill at $50, so the year comes out at $207. The old months keep the old price because that is what actually happened, and the total comes out right.

Untick it afterwards so you are ready for the next change.

Proration, for the mid-cycle upgrade

This is the detail almost nobody builds.

When you upgrade in the middle of a paid cycle, you do not pay the full new price. You already paid for those days. You pay the difference for the days remaining.

So you tick Prorate, then tick Price Changed. In the walkthrough I switched a $19 plan to $45 on 2 September with four days used. FB7 charged $41 for the month, with $26 of that being the proration, and left the renewal date sitting at 2 October where it belongs.

One exception worth knowing: some tools run on credits, and if you burn your credits then upgrade, there is no proration and you pay full price. Leave Prorate off for those.

Switch monthly to yearly

And you can move a subscription between monthly, quarterly and yearly and still get the right number. Switch to yearly at $295 mid-cycle with Prorate on, and the year total lands correctly at $417.

Every one of these flows into your month, your year, your accounts and your net worth without you touching a thing.

3. Monthly budgets that keep their own history

In most templates a budget is one number you keep overwriting, so by March you have no idea what you set in January or whether you stuck to it.

In FB7 a budget category repeats. You create it once, set it to repeat monthly at the start of the month, and each month gets its own record with its own limit. Change December without touching November.

One category, several currencies

This one surprises people.

A single budget category can hold a limit in each currency you use. $500, €1,000, £800, all on the same category. And it tracks each one separately, so a dollar expense eats your dollar budget and leaves the euro one alone.

Spend $33 against a $500 business budget and you see 7% used with $467 left, while the euro and pound lines sit untouched.

What it tells you

Each budget gives you the percentage spent, what is left, and a comparison against the same category last month. Spend $2,500 against a $1,000 limit and it tells you that is 115% of last month, not just that you are over.

There is a daily allowance too, which is the one I use most. On a transport budget it will tell you that you can spend $12 a day for the rest of the month. Blow the budget and it drops to zero, which is honest.

And there is a streak. Every month you stay under the limit, it holds. Go over and you break it. A budget you can break is a budget you can also keep, and watching a number you built over four months is a surprisingly good reason not to order the thing.

Income streams, the part I did not expect to love

Income streams are businesses or sources. Income categories are more like life areas, so job salary, side hustle, business.

Open a stream and you get a profit and loss for that one thing. Revenue in, every cost out, and a cost mix that breaks down where the money went. Mine reads expenses 53%, subscriptions 43%, bills 4%, which told me something about my own business I had been avoiding.

There is a ranking too, and it runs per currency, so your best earner in dollars and your best earner in dirham are ranked separately rather than mashed into one meaningless list.

I am genuinely obsessed with this part. It is the thing I open most.

Commitments: debts, saving goals and money you are owed

Saving goals take a frequency, a monthly contribution you commit to, a starting amount and a target. Then they tell you whether you are ahead or behind pace, and forecast when you will actually get there at your current rate.

Nothing auto-deducts. You fund a goal deliberately with a transaction, because some months you cannot, and a system that quietly moves your money for you is a system that lies to you.

Debts and loans carry APR and interest with payoff analytics. Owed to me tracks what you lent and to whom, through a people database, so you can open a person and see "owes you $15, last move 4 days ago" instead of trying to remember.

Transactions and investments

Transactions come in four types: transfer, goal funding, debt payment and money back. And a transfer handles two currencies at once, so $100 leaving PayPal and €92 arriving in your bank is one record, correct on both sides.

Investments track what you put in, what it is worth now, and the gain or loss, with closed positions kept separately from active ones.

Where it all lands: net worth, runway and your year

Four dashboards, each one showing only its own world. Holding is accounts, transactions and investments. Cashflow is income, streams, expenses and budgets. Burn is bills, subscriptions and taxes. Commitment is debts, goals and lending.

Every one of them lets you filter to a single currency and compare against a year you pick.

Then the Profile sums all of it.

Net worth, viewable in whatever currency you want. Whether you are growing or shrinking right now. And runway, which takes your cash, subtracts everything recurring, and tells you how many months you have at your current speed of spending. You did not calculate any of it.

The year view gives you net worth, total income and expenses, what you spent on subscriptions, what you saved toward goals, and your top source and category.

And a heat map of the whole year as a calendar. Green months where you came out ahead, red where you went under, and a middle state for the months where you did not go negative but you really did spend too much. Best month and worst month called out.

It takes about four seconds to look at that and know what kind of year you have had.

FB7 against a normal Notion finance tracker

I am not going to pretend other templates do nothing. The first two rows are table stakes and most of them clear it. It is everything after that.

Twelve out of twelve against two out of twelve. And I left things out of that table.

Setup takes about 15 minutes

Set up your currencies and accounts, switch on the recurring systems, set your categories, log your subscriptions and bills, add your commitments. That is it.

It is deep by design and simple to start, and there is a full video tutorial inside if you want to go all the way down.

I spent a year on FB7, and seven versions to get here. Every problem in this article is one I hit in my own money first, which is why the answers are specific rather than generic.

You can get it on its own, or get it free inside SB7 (Notion Second Brain 7.0), where your money sits in the same system as the rest of your life.

→ Get FB7