Category: Tips & Tricks

Getting Your Finances in Order for the New Year

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A new year is here and it brings a welcome reminder to check up on your finances for the year ahead. It’s also a useful reminder to check how you have things set up in Toshl, so the way you track your finances aligns well with your goals.

General financial checkup

  • Set some financial goals for the year. Are you looking to increase your investments this year? By how much and where? Are you saving up for any large purchases? Setting goals will also inform your budgeting requirements and hopefully your general attitude to your finances as well.
  • Build or Boost Your Emergency Fund. Prepare for the unexpected. Your emergency fund should probably contain about 3-6 months of your living expenses, so you can overcome new circumstances that life may throw upon you. You can start small and set just bit on the side every month until you reach that level. Put it in an account that pays out interest, just make sure the funds are liquid and accessible in case of emergencies. The peace of mind with having that fund available will help you make more rational financial decisions elsewhere.
  • Set a plan to pay off debt. Make sure you plan for repaying debts regularly if you have any to pay off. If the interest rates have fallen since you originally took out the loan, it might be worth checking with your financial institution if the debt can be reprogrammed or consolidated.
  • Set up automatic savings and investments. There are quite a few financial services and banks – including lots that you can connect directly to Toshl as bank connections – that provide round-up options and other automatic saving options. Any purchase you make can round up to the nearest round amount and save the rounded up part. Some can also automatically invest the rounded up part into your funds of choice. Broad and well diversified ETFs with low yearly costs are usually a good long term choice – but make sure to do your own research.

Toshl-specific hints

  • Reflect on the past year. What good is noting and organising all this info, if you don’t take a moment to analyse it? Set the time span to the entire 2024 and take a look at your expense and income graphs. See which categories and tags had higher or lower amounts that you expected. The Planning graphs can also be useful here, as they’ll show the movements over the entire year. This can be even more useful when filtered to individual accounts, categories or tags.
  • Set up yearly, monthly or weekly reports by email. If you’re not the reflective type on your own, the automatic email reports can help with a nudge in that direction. Automatically producing infographics based on your finances, right to your inbox. You can also customise what kind of info you’d want included there.
  • Re-evaluate your budgets. It’s always good to have a general monthly budget for all expenses to monitor your general spending. Does the amount you have set reflect your finances well? Does it allow you to save some of the incomes each month? Also check your category and tag budgets, see if they’re tracking the right spending and with the appropriate amounts. At Toshl we like to track just a few categories where your spending can vary most based on your personal choices, but budgeting styles can vary.
  • Make sure your bank connections are updated. If you’re using the automatic bank connections, go to main menu / Bank connections and check if all is green and in order there. Some bank connections may require a re-authorisation every 6 months or so, while the semi automatic ones might need a log in with every update. Keeping them up to date, makes sure that all the transaction data is flowing in as expected.
  • Set a reminder for the non-automatic stuff. Buying with cash often? The Toshl apps can send you a daily reminder at the time of your choice, so you’ll remember to add any cash expenses from the past day. You can set it in Settings / Notification. It can also serve as a reminder to import from file, if some of your accounts require that.

Make sure your financial 2025 will be cooler than a ninja with a lightsaber riding a unicorn.

Posted in Personal finance, Tips & Tricks

Launch Toshl from the Dock in macOS Sonoma

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The new macOS Sonoma was released this week and among its neat new features is an option to add websites (or web apps) to your dock and launch them straight from there. Just like you would with native Mac apps.

This also means you can save Toshl in your dock for more convenient, easier access.

To do that, open toshl.com in the Safari web browser and log in with your Toshl account. Next, click File / Add to Dock… in the menu bar on top. Alternatively you can also use the sharing button in the Safari toolbar.

Confirm or edit the naming of the dock shortcut and you’re done. The icon will be applied automatically based on the favicon already specified in Toshl.

Once you click, it will open the Toshl web app with your account already logged in and a somewhat simplified, less cluttered version of Safari without the address / toolbar.

It’s also worth mentioning that such shortcuts have already been available for a while on the iPad (Add to home) and Windows, so you can set it up in a similar way there as well if you like.

Posted in Tips & Tricks

How to Set the Default Financial Account

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When adding an expense or income in the Toshl apps, there’s a financial account that’s selected by default. You can of course change it to any account you like, but to save time, one is preselected to speed things up. Usually “Cash” will be the default account for manual expenses, this fits most users well.

If this doesn’t fit your workflow, you can easily change the default account that’s suggested.

The financial account that’s listed at top of the account list, is the one that’s suggested by default.

You can change this order by Editing the account list.

  1. Click “Edit” below the account list.

2. The account list will now show up in Edit mode. Notice the new “reorder” icons to the left of the account titles. You can click and drag this icon to change the order of accounts. Reorder as you like and click “Done” below the list to save.

The reorder icon might look a bit different in the mobile app (3 horizontal lines), but it will work just the same.

3. Your new order of accounts is now saved and will be synced across all the devices where you’re logged in to Toshl with the same account. When adding a new entry, the first listed account will be selected by default.

Posted in Android Tutorials, iOS Tutorials, Tips & Tricks, Tutorials, Web App Tutorials

Categorization Improvements: Categorically in a Category of Their Own

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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. 🙄😐

Posted in Announcements, Bank connections, Personal finance

Save Text From Receipts to Expenses Using Your Phone’s Camera (OCR)

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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.

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.

Posted in Announcements, Goodies, iOS Tutorials, Tips & Tricks
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