Category: Announcements

Search, New Navigation and Better Budgets coming to Android.

Posted on April 18, 2013

An updated Toshl Finance for Android app is now roaming the pages of Google Play. First thing you’ll notice is the new navigation style. Much cleaner, leaner, Android 4-like and most importantly, swipable left and right. But if you can swipe between expenses, incomes, sum up, budgets, where did the tag list go?

We’ve got you covered there too, we’ve made a new switcher to seamlessly switch between the timeline view and the view by tags. You can find it on the bottom right, marked with the familiar tag icon.

Search

You can now search your expenses and incomes by tags, description, amount and currency. Type it in, tap and there you go. If you’d like to search in longer periods of time, don’t forget to first change the timespan to “all time” or some timespan of that nature.

List of expenses included in the budget

Budgets are great to remind you where your money went, but sometimes you just want to go WTF?!, why is this budget so low already? Now you can check. In the budget details, you’ll find a list of included expenses enabling you to see exactly where that budget vanished to and which expenses are the culprits.

Improved budget history

Knowing how you did with a budgets in the months before and where you should improve is also very important. We’ve improved the history view, made the list nicer, but most important, you can see the details of the budgets from the past. You can even see which expenses were included in them.

Localisation

At Toshl we have always aspired to treat citizens of the world equally and now we’ve taken a step further towards living up to our ideals. With your help we have localised the app into many different languages. The biggest thanks goes to the loyal users of Toshl who have helped to translate the app into their own languages.

Together we will continue to improve the translations, add some parts that are perhaps missing and bring new supported languages to the app. You can help out too by visiting translate.toshl.com. There, we have set up a super simple translation interface, where you can fill in the blanks for your language, even if it is just a few sentences at a time.

From today on Toshl for Android will be available in English, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Portuguese, Slovenian and Spanish. Some of the other translations are already in progress and hopefully, with your help, we’ll be able to publish them soon.

Performance optimisation & bug fixes

As always we’ve worked on making Toshl Finance a lot quicker, stabler and error free. Hopefully it will quickly show.

Download Toshl Finance from Google Play

You can also download the APK file directly from our servers.

Posted in Announcements

Merge, Add and Remove Multiple Tags

Posted on March 27, 2013

When you’re starting to track your personal finances, you sometimes need a try or two to know what you really want. For example, do you want to track spending with the names of all the restaurants or just keep it all under the food tag? To make adapting your system easier, we have now added simple tools to merge, add and remove tags on toshl.com.

Update: This is an outdated version of the article for the old Toshl web app. Please see the updated version here: Edit Categories and Tags (Web App)

How do I merge tags?

Let’s say you no longer wish to track tags “food” and “restaurants” separately. Simply go to Tags in your account and find the Merge expense tags below.

Then select “food” and “restaurant” from the dropdown menu, review them and then choose a name for the new, merged, tag. Since I’m feeling very utilitarian today, the new food tag shall be named “human fuel”.

If you wish, you can also check which expenses will be affected. The list will open in a new window and won’t interrupt your process.

All you have to do next is click Merge, confirm and there you go; all your “food” and “restaurants” are belong to “human fuel”. ;)

Toshl monsters sometimes take merging too far.

How do I add tags to multiple expenses?

Go to Tags in your Expenses or Income section and click on the Add expense tags below.

You can add tags to expenses with an existing tag, for example you want all the expenses tagged with “burek” (delicious Balkan pastry) to also be tagged with “food”.

Another way of using this functionality is to add a tag to all expenses within a date range. For example, I went on holiday to the Iranian city of Esfahan from 12th to the 25th of March 2013. I can then easily tag all the expenses within that range with the tag “Iran 2013”, so I’ll know exactly how much I spent during my travel there.

Review the expenses that this tag addition will affect, click Add tags, confirm and there you go. If you followed our example you can then see how much you spent in Iran in 2013 and know not to buy more than two silk carpets the next time you’re around.

How do I remove tags from multiple expenses?

As always, go to Tags and find the Remove expense tags below.

Select the tag you wish to remove from the dropdown menu. With expenses where there are multiple tags, the tag will simply be removed once you hit the Remove button. If there are some expenses, repeating expenses or budgets where the tag you selected for removal is the only one, then we’ll ask you what to do with those. You can either keep them and they will be left as they are, or you can choose to delete them, in which case the expenses and budgets themselves will be deleted. It cannot be undone, so tread with caution.

Review the expenses that will be affected, click remove, confirm and those pesky redundant no-good expense tags shall bother you no more.

These tools are only available in our web app on toshl.com. They are not something you would use every day and would add unnecessary complexity to our mobile apps. So you can make the changes that you wish on toshl.com and after you’ve made your modifications, sync your Toshl Finance phone app. All the changes you have made will be reflected there.

All these instructions above work just the same for income tags, although if you’re like us, you will try to avoid mass removal of income. ;)

Posted in Announcements, Tips & Tricks, Tutorials

Nokia, It Was a Fun Ride, But WeeGo Off Symbian and MeeGo

Posted on March 7, 2013

Today we have released an update of Toshl Finance for Symbian^3 containing some fixes to make it more reliable and quicker. We’ll soon be releasing a similar update for the MeeGo platform. These will be the last releases of Toshl Finance for these two platforms. It has been quite a ride, but I think we need to start seeing other platforms.

Toshl remains available on Symbian and MeeGo

Toshl will remain available on both platforms and will continue to function normally in the future, including sync with toshl.com and all the other goodies. You can download the Toshl Finance app on the Nokia Store. The only thing that changes is that Symbian and MeeGo versions won’t be getting new features as they become available on other platforms.

You can also use Toshl Finance on iOS, Android or Windows Phone or the Web and once you log in, all the data that you entered or Symbian (or any other device) will automatically be available there.

Why we aren’t developing new features on Symbian and MeeGo

It’s quite simple really, Symbian has recently been officially discontinued few months ago, but the writing has been on the wall for both Symbian and MeeGo ever since Stephen Elop released the burning platform memo and announced the transition to Windows Phone in 2011. Symbian, while great in its heyday, never completely got it’s edge back after the release of iPhone and later Android and was on a doomed trajectory for a while while still enjoying relatively high market share around the world.

MeeGo was and is a great mobile operating system with some user experience innovations, which other mobile OS makers can still learn from today. Sadly it was a late entrant to the platform wars and never got the proper wind in it’s sails it required from Nokia. For years Nokia had a slightly schizophrenic platform strategy instead of focusing on one future platform. Which probably should have been MeeGo at the time. Perhaps a more apt metaphor that Elop could use, would be that they were standing on multiple burning platforms and instead of deciding which platform to put out the fire on, they decided to jump into the waters of Windows Phone and Microsoft collaboration.

Agree or disagree, we could debate the merits of those strategic decisions for days. During coffee breaks at Toshl, we often do. The fact remains though, Symbian and MeeGo market share is falling fast and with it the user base of people who could use applications like ours. We need to focus on platforms where growth is strong and a viable future remains.

Godspeed Nokia and Windows Phone

What we’ve always appreciated about Nokia though is that they always had regional representatives you could talk to, cared about localisations and were ready to cooperate with marketing campaigns as well. This is sadly changing now as their orientation becomes more and more US-centric as software development has shifted largely to Microsoft and cost-cutting takes place.

We certainly hope Nokia’s new Windows Phones and the new strategy grow successful. We genuinely like the Windows Phone OS and Toshl Finance on Windows Phone is popular, well polished and continues to be high on our roadmap. It also enables us to develop nifty little things like live tiles that show how your budgets and balance move as time goes by, right on the home screen.

What’s up with the Toshl Symbian & MeeGo developers?

Nejc Pintar, our erstwhile Qt developer, is moving on to iOS development, coding the upcoming Toonia Colorbook iPad app. While that’s occupying him during work hours he remains an avid Qt supporter in his free time and continues to participate in the Qt community.

So farewell Symbian, MeeGo and thanks for all the (sail)fish.

Posted in Announcements

Toshl Web App Updated: Travel Trough Time

Posted on February 6, 2013

The Toshl web app is where you can come to keep a tab on your finances when you have the luxury of a bit larger screen than on your mobile device. In quite a lot of ways it builds on the features from mobile devices and adds some extra power. This time, we’ve updated the web app with time spans, currencies and a whole lot of other goodies.

Custom Timespans on The Web

This is a feature where we were running a bit behind the mobile versions, but now all the apps are up to speed. You can set a custom timespan on the web, but keep using My financial month for the majority of your browsing.

It’s even nicer on the web, since you can see the data in graphs in any time period that you like and get a better sense of your finances. Perfect for summing up the costs of travel or doing a whole year’s review for example.

Your timespan settings now also sync with your mobile devices so there’s no confusion or additional settings-tapping for you.

Use ALL The Currencies

We’ve made some big changes when it comes to handling foreign currencies. We previously had about 30 currencies pre-entered and with daily updated exchange rates. The rest could be added as a custom currency. Now we’ve greatly expanded that list. Toshl now supports 161 currencies with exchange rates updated daily. We’ve got everything from the Afghan Afgani to the Zimbabwean Dollar. There’s even support for Bitcoin (BTC) if you’re into virtual currencies and the thrilling sport of financial bubble surfing. If you still can’t find your currency on the list among all these, you can still use a custom currency. We dare you. ;)

The currency settings have also been improved, with a clearer difference between the currently active currency and the main one you use most of the time and base your calculations and graphs on.

Go on a Hot Date

Getting a date is now much easier. ;) We’ve changed the date picker to a one with a much nicer calendar browser it’s a few clicks closer and the road to your desired date nicer. If you want you can also type the date right in the field and not bother with any of that pesky moving of your hand away from the keyboard.

When you’re browsing in a month that’s not the current one and want to add an expense, Toshl will also automatically suggest a date in that month, making your life a bit easier.

Under The Hood

You might not see the difference right away, but we have made a lot of changes in the background. The graphs and a whole lot of other interactive elements of the web app are now done in jQuery. That might not mean a lot to you, but it should generally work smoother, faster and it will be easier for us to expand the functionality in the future. Things like better visualisations are coming your way. There’s also a lot of smaller improvements, we hope you’ll notice a nice detail or two that are nicer than before.

We invite you to log in to toshl.com and check out the new goodies. Your feedback is appreciated and we’re always working on continuously improving the experience.

Posted in Announcements

New Toshl for Android. Use ALL The Currencies!

Posted on February 4, 2013

We’ve got some great news, we’ve just updated the Toshl Finance Android app to 1.7.4. The version number might not sound like much has changed, but looks can be deceiving.

Use ALL The Currencies

We’ve made some big changes when it comes to handling foreign currencies. We previously had about 30 currencies pre-entered and with daily updated exchange rates. The rest could be added as a custom currency. Now we’ve greatly expanded that list. Toshl now supports 161 currencies with exchange rates updated daily. We’ve got everything from the Afghan Afgani to the Zimbabwean Dollar. There’s even support for Bitcoin (BTC) if you’re into virtual currencies and the thrilling sport of financial bubble surfing. If you still can’t find your currency on the list among all these, you can still use a custom currency. We dare you. ;)

Currencies with exchange rates toshl currency converter

As the list of currencies got a lot longer we’ve also added search through currencies as well as a nicer currency settings screen so it’s easy to differentiate between the currently active currency and your main currency. Best of all, these settings also sync with the web app now so you’ll never be caught with your pants down when trying to enter an expense during international travel. Unless that’s your thing.

Daily Expense Entry Reminders

Daily reminders have finally come to the Android app. It can be difficult to remember to enter all the expenses you make during the day. You now have the option to set up a daily reminder, at any time you like, so you’ll never forget to enter those expenses.

The Midget Widget

Until now we’ve had a 2×1 widget with a shortcut to add an expense right from your Android desktop. Quite a few people have said that they’d like one in smaller size as well, so their desktops need not be so crowded. Your wish is our command, so we added a 1×1 widget this time around.

Other Fodder

There’s also a lot of other fixes under the hood, things you hopefully won’t notice because everything works so smoothly now. Sync works better, especially on older devices, in-app purchases avoid a delay that would sometimes happen and a plethora of other bugfixes.

We hope you enjoy all the new additions and that you’ll travel enough to try out all the currencies. ;) Download Toshl Finance from Google Play.

Posted in Announcements