In Reply to: Lastest rates posted by RobynJ on Monday, 31. December 2001 at 14:31 Bali Time:
There are several on-line services that provide, on an hour-by-hour basis, currency conversion rates for all currencies. I use www.xe.com/ucc which at this moment is saying 1 AUD is worth IDR 5321.15.
If you have an ATM card that doesn't charge extra fees the machines in Bali will give you something very close to that amount, minus a 1% fee for their trouble. "Something close" because there are many currency markets with very slightly different rates. Arbitrage keeps them from being very far apart, though, so the differences are insignificant to tourists.
If you don't use an ATM card (please reconsider!) the nice money changers you meet will know very well that the day's rate is 5315, but will take a little extra for themselves for their real and imagined risks, plus of course a little profit, and the fees they themselves incur when they get loaded up on AUD and have to take the excess to their bank. So the rate on the street will be a couple percent worse than 5315. It varies a little from shop to shop. In some countries, money changers add a fixed fee to transactions which may fool the arithmetically-challenged into thinking they're getting a better rate, but I haven't seen much of that in Bali.