It’s one thing to say; “My budget and I, we go waaay back”, but how much do you really know about your budget’s past? I’m not talking about that one time they experimented with tags and financial account filtering back in college. I mean the real nitty gritty stuff, the budget’s historical performance.

We’re all a bit optimistic when we first set up the budgets. Yet the real trial of your budgeting resolve, comes when you see the results of past budget periods and decide what you’ll do about them. Sometimes your spending or the budgets just need a little re-adjustment, sometimes a whole new strategy is needed.

We’re introducing a much improved budget history graph to help you with that.

There’s been a budget history graph in Toshl for a while. You could just open any budget’s details and scroll all the way down. The budget history is still there, but the new graph tells you a lot more.

Before, you’d see how much you spent in total in any given month.

Now, you’ll see:

• The budget amount for the month.
• Total spending.
• How much you went under or over your budget amount, clearly marked with red where you went over or the light grey area, showing how much space you have until the budget amount would be reached.

You’ll notice that monthly budgets feature a bit more info still:

• Yearly sum of monthly budgets. In the case above, it’s a monthly category budget for food. The budget for the individual month in this case is 350 €. The budget history graph will now automatically project this for the full calendar year, showing the 4200 € yearly sum (350 € x 12) and also sum up your past monthly budget to see how much you’ve spent so far.

The budget details are already featured above the history. So the graph doesn’t show exact numbers by default, but you can easily dig into more detail. As with other graphs in Toshl, click and hold on the graph column to show the details for each column.

As with this yearly budget history, you can see exactly how much was spent in a particular period and how that compares with your budgeting goals.

Toshl adapts the graph scale based on the results, so you can see the differences in your budget’s performance between periods. Making those differences clearly visible, also means sometimes cutting off some outliers – columns with spending so far out of proportion with the rest of the periods, that they go over the graph’s scale. In those cases, you’ll see that as a dark red column being cut-off, to signify it goes over the graph’s scale.

See that dark red column above, going out? In the immortal words of Flight of the Conchords channelling Bowie; How far out are you man? I’m pretty far out man! Worry not, click on it and you’ll know exactly how far out that budget overspending really is. Though, I hope your bank account can handle what the graph’s scale can’t.

We’ve been gradually releasing this feature across the Toshl apps on the web, Android and iOS, so you might have already seen this in action. If not, make sure you’re updated to the latest app version, tap a budget and take a trip down the memory lane of your finances.