It's the last day of the month. You open your spreadsheet and start adding up what you earned.
$340 from PayPal. €180 from Wise. £75 from a UK student who paid via bank transfer. ₱12,000 from a local student. And $50 in cash from someone's parent who visited your city.
So what did you earn this month?
You genuinely don't know. Not without opening four tabs, checking today's exchange rates, doing the conversions, and hoping you didn't miss a payment somewhere in your WhatsApp history.
And here's the part that never makes it into the spreadsheet: the $340 from PayPal wasn't really $340. PayPal took their cut. And the €180 from Wise—what was the rate when it actually converted? Was it the rate on Tuesday when the student paid, or Thursday when you withdrew it?
You round some numbers, guess at others, and arrive at a figure that's probably close. Probably.
This is how most independent tutors track their income. Every single month.
Why This Is Harder Than It Looks
If all your students paid in the same currency, this wouldn't be an article. You'd add up the numbers and move on.
But international tutors don't have that luxury. A typical tutor based in the Philippines or Eastern Europe might receive money in three or four currencies in a single week. Each payment arrives through a different channel, at a different exchange rate, on a different day.
The conversions aren't stable either. If you're tracking in Philippine pesos, the USD/PHP rate can swing 2-3% in a month. On a $2,000 income, that's a ₱2,000-3,000 difference depending on when you check. Which rate do you use—the rate when the student paid, the rate when you converted, or today's rate?
There's no wrong answer. But there's no obvious right answer either. So most tutors pick whatever number looks reasonable and move on.
The Spreadsheet That Starts Simple
Every tutor who goes independent builds the same spreadsheet. It starts with four columns: date, student, amount, currency. Clean and manageable.
By month two, you've added a "converted amount" column. By month three, there's a "payment method" column and a "fees" column. By month four, the formula bar looks like a ransom note and you've got three tabs you're afraid to touch because something will break.
The real problem isn't the complexity—it's that the spreadsheet can't answer the one question you actually care about: how much money do I have?
It can tell you that a student paid €30 on March 12th. It can't tell you what that €30 was worth in your currency on March 12th versus what it's worth today. It can't subtract the Wise transfer fee automatically. It can't show you that your actual take-home from a $25 lesson was $23.80 after PayPal took their cut.
So you end up with a spreadsheet that's technically accurate and practically useless.
The Real Numbers
Let's make this concrete. Say you're based in Poland, earning in zloty, and you taught 28 lessons this month:
- 12 lessons at $25 USD (via PayPal) = $300
- 8 lessons at €22 EUR (via Wise) = €176
- 4 lessons at £20 GBP (via bank transfer) = £80
- 4 lessons at 100 PLN (local, cash) = 400 PLN
Quick—what did you earn in zloty?
You need the USD/PLN rate, the EUR/PLN rate, the GBP/PLN rate. And those rates were different on each day you received each payment. And PayPal took 2.9% + $0.30 on the USD payments. And Wise took about 0.5% on the EUR transfers.
After fifteen minutes of tab-switching and calculator work, you arrive at something around 4,100-4,200 PLN. Roughly. Depending on which rates you used.
Now do that every month. Now do it at tax time when you need to reconcile the whole year.
What This Actually Costs You
The time cost is obvious—an hour or two per month fiddling with conversions and reconciling payments. Annoying, but manageable.
The hidden cost is worse: you don't actually know your numbers.
You don't know which students are most profitable after conversion and fees. You don't know if your EUR students are earning you more or less than your USD students this quarter—because the rates shifted. You don't know if you should be raising your rate for UK students because the pound dropped.
When you don't know your real numbers, you can't make real decisions. You're pricing by gut feel instead of data. And gut feel, across multiple currencies, is usually wrong.
What Actually Works
A few habits that help:
Pick one currency and convert everything immediately. Don't track in multiple currencies and "figure it out later." Every payment gets logged in your home currency on the day it arrives. The rate won't be perfect, but at least your running total means something.
Track the actual amount received, not the invoice amount. If you invoiced $25 and PayPal deposited $23.80, log $23.80. The invoice amount is what you asked for. The deposited amount is what you earned. These are different numbers and you should be tracking the second one.
Log payments the same day they arrive. The exchange rate on the day you received the money is the rate that matters. If you batch your bookkeeping at the end of the month and use that day's rates, your numbers will be off—sometimes by quite a bit.
Use a tool that does the conversion for you. This is the real answer. You shouldn't be manually looking up EUR/PLN rates and typing them into a spreadsheet. The technology exists. The rates are available via free APIs. The math is trivial for software and tedious for humans.
This Is Why SandGlass Has a Multi-Currency Dashboard
When you log a payment in SandGlass, you enter what you received and in what currency. The system converts it to your home currency automatically, using that day's rate, and stores both amounts.
Your dashboard shows one number: what you earned this month, in your currency. You can drill down by student, by payment method, by currency—but the top-line number is always there, always accurate, always in the currency you actually spend.
It also tracks by student. So when you're wondering whether to adjust your rates for a particular market, you can see exactly what each student is earning you in real terms—not in the currency they pay, but in the currency you live in.
No spreadsheet formulas. No rate lookups. No end-of-month guessing.
Try SandGlass free — no commission, no percentage fees, just a flat €12/month after the free tier.
This is part of our series on building a sustainable independent tutoring practice. Previously: The True Cost of Preply's 33% Commission and The Timezone Trap: Why 3PM Means Nothing.