Country, currency and language
Onboarding asks for three things. None of them is cosmetic, so it is worth understanding what each one drives.
Country
Your country decides which bank catalogue you see when you create an account. The app ships with 526 banks, and the picker filters them by country so you are not scrolling past institutions from the other side of the world.
It also sets sensible defaults for currency and formatting, and it is what makes the Colombian tax module appear for the people it applies to.
You can change it later in Settings.
Main currency
This is the currency your totals are expressed in: the balance at the top of Transactions, the report KPIs, the home dashboard cards.
Two rules matter here, and both exist to protect your history:
One account, one currency. An account holds a single currency, and you choose it when you create the account. If your bank gives you a dollar account and a peso account, that is two accounts in AI Money, which is also how your bank thinks about it. The currency of an account can only be set at creation time; to change it, delete the account and create it again.
Changing your main currency does not rewrite your history. Nothing is reconverted. Every transaction keeps the amount and the currency it was recorded with, forever. What changes is the lens you look through. This is deliberate: converting stored amounts buries the real currency of a payment, and there is no way to get it back afterwards.
If you deal in more than one currency at once, read Multiple currencies. It explains the "worlds" model, which is the part people find surprising at first and obvious afterwards.
Language
AI Money speaks English, Spanish, Japanese and Portuguese (Brazil). The language you pick changes the interface, the default categories that get created, the assistant's replies, and the notifications your phone shows, including the ones the system fires while the app is closed.
Pick the language before you build your ledger if you can. The starter categories are created in the language that was active when your database was first created, and renaming twenty categories later is nobody's idea of an evening.
Exchange rates, if you use several currencies
Rates come from a public reference table through our server. No personal information travels with that request: the app asks "what is the rate for this base currency", nothing else.
They are cached for 24 hours on the device, so the app keeps working offline, and every rate the app shows you carries the date the rate was published, never a vague "a moment ago". If you see a conversion, you can always check how fresh it is.