We’ve added a few new currencies to Toshl. With official currency support, Toshl apps provide always fresh exchange rates for those currencies. This brings us to the total of 302 currencies supported on Toshl, 116 of which are cryptocurrencies. You can use them anywhere you enter amounts on Toshl, be it an expense, income, budget or financial account.
We and our connection partners made an update to the categorisation system, which should provide more accurate auto-assigned categories and tags on US and Canadian connections. The improved system is already live, so any incoming transactions are already using it. The default systematization is now more appropriate for personal finance applications like ours, even before being adapted to the default set of categories we use in Toshl. The earlier system used a broader and slightly dated venue classification, more often used by credit card companies.
This of course applies to new transactions, where the applied category and tags are based primarily on the transaction description that’s provided by the bank. On top of that, Toshl automatically learns from your corrections, so entries with similar descriptions will use your preferred categorisation.
In some cases it’s also able to determine the geographic coordinates based on the bank data and put the transaction on your map automatically, although this is still quite rare with most transactions.
If you’re very strict when it comes to your own accounting and would prefer to manually assign every category and tag, you can do that too. Just open the bank connections screen and tap Edit on an individual connection. You can set the categorization option to OFF there, so all new entries come in as “unsorted”. The same can be applied to transfer matching. Keeping the categorization ON however, can also help with transfer matching, as detecting an expense fits in the “Transfer” category is one of the factor that helps with detecting them. The system is then more inclined to look for the income part of the transfer and match it into a transfer.
Smaller improvements were also made in the way pending transaction categorisation is handled on all automatic bank connections, providing for more flexibility when the bank changes the transaction description considerably between authorising and fully settling the transactions.
Even when there are no new systemic changes such as the ones mentioned here, the categorization is constantly improving due to machine learning systems which learn from anonymized categorization data.
I suppose this goon could get re-tagged as “Russian security services” from here on out. 🙄😐
Freedom! Today we bring more freedom to your transactions, tomorrow we’ll perhaps take a shot at redefining the modern social contract and the balance of positive and negative freedoms within a society. Perhaps. Just don’t ask us for delivery time estimates.
Before we get too off track, here are the kind of liberties that we’re enabling in Toshl today.
Let’s say you have a bank connection and automatically import your expenses, incomes and transfers that way. Until now, a few entry properties that were provided by the bank were locked from editing. With today’s updates of the Toshl mobile apps, all entry properties are freely editable, including:
amount
date
currency
exchange rate
account
reminders
Categories, tags and descriptions were already fully editable before.
It’s now also possible to add manual entries on accounts that are connected to the bank and usually add entries automatically. Connected accounts are the ones marked with a green globe icon.
Why this change?
Initially, we thought that banks would be much better at providing accurate data via their official channels, so locking some info from editing seemed like a safer option. After a few years of experience with various banking APIs, we now know that’s often not the case and now occasionally consider keeping our money in socks beneath our beds instead of bank accounts. Coincidentally, we also sell socks (see 3-year plan).
Only some banks are that problematic though and lots of bank APIs work well. The Shitty Bank List keeps track of worst offenders, if you’re interested. In some cases, the data is fine, but you’d just want to change the date for personal budgeting reasons or similar.
Bank connections in more detail
We’re now also providing more info about how bank connections work and how often they update. Go to main menu / Bank connections and tap Edit next to an existing connection to check it out.
There are several types of bank connections, depending on which technical capabilities the banks provide or don’t, which technical partners provide them and the type of regulations exist in the country. In short, this should help you better understand when and how often the connection updates.
Optional categorization
Entires imported from bank connections are automatically assigned categories and tags, if they can be deduced from the entry description. It also learns from your corrections. While most transactions should be categorized well, this can vary a bit depending on your bank and the type of information they provide. For example, if your bank reports only random numbers or huge blocks of text with every entry, the categorization system will have much a harder time determining the correct category.
To better accommodate such circumstances, we’ve made both this automations optional. They can be set on the level of the individual bank connections, so you can keep the auto-categorisation with the other banks that work well with it, for example.
If the categorisation is set to OFF, all the transactions imported via that bank connection will import as “unsorted” and you can manually assign categories later.
Optional transfer detection, improved review system
Transfers between accounts are also automatically detected, based on expense / income pairs on different accounts. If you have lots of financial accounts, with similar transactions that could be mistaken for 2 ends of a transfer, this could produce false positives. Transfer matches are now also optional and can be turned off per-connection.
We’ve also made other improvements to the detection system, removing the transfers category as detection criteria which should help with the accuracy and result in a lot less potential transfers to review.
Connections that clean up after themselves
When you remove a bank connection, the financial accounts and transaction data that it previously imported, remain. The financial accounts become manual and no longer update automatically, but the transaction data up to that point is still there. While this data preservation is desired in most cases, it can sometimes leave you with a bit of extra work, if you want to delete the transactions and accounts as well.
When removing a bank connection, you’ll now also be offered an option to delete all the data that the bank connection imported. Use this option cautiously as the deletion of data cannot be undone. This option requires a password or social log in confirmation. Additional warnings and explanations were added to make the data removal peril apparent.
Availability
All these new features are available in the latest versions of Toshl apps on Android and iOS. They’re released gradually, so they become available to a larger percent of all Toshl users each day and will be available for everyone within a few days. Once available for your account, it will update automatically. If it hasn’t updated yet, you can also start the update manually on the Toshl app page in the App Store or Google Play. The features are not available in the web app yet and are expected later on.
Update: The full editing features have been enabled on the web app as well. The connected financial accounts and the entries on them are now fully editable on the web app as well.
Monstrous advisory: If your bank account gets frozen, global warming won’t help. Act and vote accordingly.
Today, we’ve added a few new crypto currencies in Toshl with fresh exchange rates provided by Coinbase.
Tether (USDT)
Solana (SOL)
Polkadot (DOT)
Avalanche (AVAX)
Internet Computer (ICP)
SHIBA INU (SHIB)
This brings the total to 289 currencies supported in Toshl. 170 fiat currencies, 103 crypto, 4 commodities (e.g. gold) and 12 deprecated currencies. Deprecated currencies are no longer in active use, but historical exchange rates are kept for archival reasons. Ever heard of the Slovenian tolar?
A short prayer to bring Javier Solana out of retirement, now that there’s a currency named after him.
You’re saving an expense. You got the amount and category noted in two taps, just tap Save and you’re done. But the receipt is right in front of you and there’s so much more information there; exact items purchased, company, time, location, salesperson etc. You know that you can take and save a photo of the receipt, but then the content wouldn’t be searchable…
There’s a better way. With iOS 15, you can tap into a text field use the camera to instantly scan text and insert it into the field, right from the app. Best you see how this works for yourself in the videos below.
Works with actual receipts, but it becomes slightly more error prone with more diverse formatting and languages. Still very useful and easy.
Since it's based on machine learning, we're expecting the quality to improve with more #iOS15 use as well.
This way, you can add lots of extra info to your expenses, incomes and transfers in a second or two. The text remains searchable and if you want the full photo, you could also save it in the photos tab.
While this excitement comes hot on the heels of the iOS 15 release, Android users, fret not. A similar feature has been available for a while on Android devices, albeit through the Google Lens / Camera app.
To use it, tap the Google Lens button on the top right corner of the camera app. Select the text you need in the camera app and copy it. You can then paste this text when adding the expense in Toshl.
