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.
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.
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. 🙄😐
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.
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.
Okay, perhaps don’t take the memory lane all the way back to hunting-gathering times. You might want to focus on budget history after currencies were invented.
Keeping you better informed about your finances is what we do at Toshl. Today, we’re unveiling email reports and improved file exports, to keep you informed even more thoroughly, yet effortlessly.
Email reports
They come in regular weekly, monthly and yearly instalments. They’ll help you see the state of your finances right now, discover how you got there and what’s coming up in the near future.
Quick preview of the email reports. Click on the image to show a full size report with sample data.
What’s in the report?
Left to spend amount comparisons of your average spending in this period to past ones.
Account balances of financial account on the last day the report includes. As this might be sensitive information in some cases, this option is deactivated by default and can be added at will.
Sums of expenses, incomes as well as their categories, tags and daily averages.
3 largest expenses and 3 largest incomes in the past period.
Budget summaries for budgets that match the time span of the reported period.
Coming up, the list of largest expenses and incomes coming up in the next period after the email report.
Exported files for the same period can be automatically added to email reports as well, including files with custom filters.
Exports
Sometimes you’d also need to inform others about the state of your financial affairs, or at least the part that affects them. For example, notify your roommates about the sums of shared expense tags last month. Perhaps you need to send a report including your business expense receipts from last month to the office. Last but not least, sometimes you just need a summary of a financial period and some extra records for backup. In any case, the new file export and email report improvements in Toshl have you covered.
While we’ve offered file exports in Toshl from the start, this update takes them to the next level.
PDF
Completely redesigned and redone.
Printer friendly, with most of the document in black and white, using less surfaces to save up on ink.
Transaction lists are much easier to read now, include descriptions, repeat, location, splitting and paid / unpaidinformation.
Transfers between financial accounts and balance reconciliations are now included by default.
Foreign currency amount, main currency amount and exchange rate are included if the transaction is in a foreign currency.
Photos and PDF attachments can now be added to the exported PDF. Images of expense receipts can be included as 1 per page or 4 per page, depending on how large you need them to report. Receipt images also linked from the transaction list itself, so the receipt copy can be easily referenced.
Monthly overview graph with the current state of finances and average spending.
Account balances on the last day of the exported time span.
Expense, income graphs are now included. This includes the donut graph for categories as well as the tag bubbles to get a better sense of proportions.
Expense, income sums listed per category, per tag and per financial account. Listed from the largest to the smallest sum in the period for easier comparisons.
Budget summaries for budgets that match the time span of the exported period.
CSV, XLS (Excel), OFX
Transfers and account balance reconciliations are now included by default.
Photos and attachments can now be added to these exports. They come in the form of the transaction file and images sorted into folders, packed together in a ZIP file.
New support for the OFX file format. Quick to export and import (no column matching required), but unfortunately cannot include category and tag data.
General notes
The exported files are no longer sent via email in the mobile apps. They’re now available directly, with the file downloaded in the app. Further actions are available using the system “open with” and share dialogues on iOS and Android.
The CSV, XLS and OFX files can also be imported back into Toshl.
While most exporting should complete quickly, picking a long time span with lots of data – especially images, can take a bit longer. If that happens to take more than a few minutes, fear not, all is still well. You can freely close the app and when the exporting finishes on our servers, we’ll send you a notification informing you that the exported file is now available.
If you’re having issues with the CSV not displaying unicode characters in Excel – like in Arab, Hebrew or pretty much any non-Latin script, make sure to import it to Excel as a CSV file. If you just open the CSV, Excel doesn’t detect text encoding well. If you import the file as CSV, set encoding to UTF-8, it will import correctly.
Filtering data for export
What makes these features really powerful, is the option to filter the exports however you want. For starters, you can select the types of data you want included in the file, as seen on the left screen.
Tap the global filtering button on the top right of the screen. There, you can filter by:
time span; my financial months or any custom time span
Tap the funnel icon just below the tabs and the filtering screen on the right opens up, to filter by:
categories
tags
locations
You can use a combination of filters to get the report you desire.
A common use for this is making a report of shared expenses. Marking the expenses that you share with someone with an additional tag. Then make a PDF report filtered by that tag to figure out how much you owe each other. The report can also include individual transactions, so everyone can see how you got to that sum.
You can also make business expense reports this way. Mark business expenses with an extra tag, as well as add the expense receipt images if you need additional information. Export to PDF and you can attach the expense receipts right in there. Moreover, you can also send a report like this to yourself every month, attached to the email report.
All data exports
Export all images and file attachments. Can also be filtered by time span or account.
Export all data you have on Toshl in CSV form, including data on past payments, devices used etc. Additional metadata is available via the Toshl Developer API.
How do I get started?
The updated features are already available in the web app on toshl.com and in the latest Toshl Finance apps on Android and iOS. Version 3.5 and upwards.
CSV exports are free. PDF, XLS (Excel) and OFX files require either Toshl Pro or Medici.
Images of expense receipts require either Toshl Pro or Medici.
Email reports are free for all users, but become a lot more useful when paired with an automatically updating bank connection included in Toshl Medici.
