The merging feature is handy if you want to put the data from a few financial accounts on one account. This is especially useful when migrating from manual to connected financial accounts, or if reconnecting a previously connected bank, which then creates new financial accounts.
Merging manual accounts with automatic (connected) ones
Perhaps you were initially tracking your bank account expenses and incomes manually. Or, perhaps, you’ve used a different type of bank connection before and switched to a new automatic account for that bank.
It’s likely that you’ve put some effort into categorizing expenses and incomes on your existing financial account and do not want to lose anything when importing new accounts from the bank connection.
To keep your manually entered data and import automatically from now on, you can simply set the automatic account to import from a certain day onward and then merge it with the earlier manual account.
When you connect your bank, choose the date from which you’d like to import the transactions. This should be the date after which you’ve stopped noting the transactions manually. This way, you’ll be able to merge the two accounts and avoid potential overlap of transactions.
As soon as you are ready to merge your manual account with the account(s) imported from the bank:
1. Tap the Accounts / Time span button on the top right of the screen. Or swipe from the right. The Accounts list will show up. Tap Edit on the bottom of the Accounts list.
2. Find the financial account you want to merge and tap the Edit icon in front of it. The Edit account screen will open.
3. Tap Merge Accounts.
4. Select the account(s) you want to merge with.
The default title of the final (merged) account will be shown in the Title field. You can change it into anything you like.
If you select multiple automatic accounts for merging, you’ll need to pick the accounts that will continue to feed the data from the bank into the newly merged account. The accounts can continue to keep updating from multiple connected financial accounts at your bank.
If the currencies of merged accounts differ, you’ll be prompted to select the currency of the final merged account as well.
5. Tap Merge Accounts
6. If you’re sure about merging the accounts, tap Merge Accounts again.
The newly merged account will then be displayed in the Accounts list.
The balance of the merged account will depend on how you chose to keep the account updated. If it continues to update automatically from bank accounts, the balance will keep being updated as the one that the bank provides. If you chose not to update the account automatically, the balance will be based on the sum of transactions and reconciliations up to today, like any manual account.
Merging automatic accounts
You might also want to merge connected accounts. You can do so following the same steps described above.
As with cases above, if you chose to continue updating from the bank, the balance will also be updated from the bank. If you continue to update from several accounts, the sum of those account balances will be used.
Merging manual accounts
You have collected some cash in a box. You’ve created a “Box” account in the Toshl app and have been entering all the amounts. What if you take all the cash from the box and decide to track it within your main “Cash” account? No problem! You can merge your “Cash” account with the “Box” account. For that:
1. Tap the Accounts / Time span button on the top right of the screen. Or swipe from the right. The Accounts list will show up. Tap Edit on the bottom of the Accounts list.
2. Find the financial account you want to merge and tap the Edit icon in front of it. The Edit account screen will open.
3. Tap Merge Accounts.
4. Select the account you want to merge it with.
The default title of the final (merged) account will be displayed in the Title field. Feel free to change it into any custom option.
In case the currencies of merged accounts differ, you can select the currency of the final merged account as well.
5. Tap Merge Accounts.
6. If you are sure about merging the accounts, tap Merge Accounts again.
The merged account will be displayed in the Accounts list.
After merging the manual accounts, the balance of the merged account will be re-calculated based on the sum of all transactions of the merged accounts up to today.
Merge with care, as such operations cannot be undone. Some of our Toshl monster friends learnt that the hard way. But they also report that their relationship has improved with merging. They can finally see eye to eye regarding their finances.
Your finances are easiest to control when most of your tracking is automated. Less work for you, more time to improve your understanding of your general financial picture and more time to do whatever tickles your fancy.
This tutorial will help you set up your Toshl Finance account, presuming you’ll use an automatic connection to your bank, credit card or other financial services. We call it a bank connection to keep it short. Here, we’ll show you how to connect using the Toshl iOS app. There are also tutorials for Web and Android. You can also use Toshl with manual accounts only.
To use a bank connection you’ll need:
A bank, credit card or financial service supported in Toshl. Thousands are supported worldwide, it’s quite likely that yours is as well. New ones are regularly added: list of supported bank connections .
A Toshl user account upgraded to Toshl Medici which enables the bank connections and all the other useful features of Toshl Pro. Maintaining all these connections and improving the apps takes significant resources, so we cannot offer this completely free. A free 30-day trial is available though.
So let’s go into the action, here’s what you should do:
1. Add your automatic financial accounts
Most likely, the first thing you would like to do in your Toshl app is to connect a bank account and add a credit card or two to as well. To do so:
1. Find your bank, credit card or financial account in the list of bank connection. For that, just go to the Bank connections section in the main menu and tap New bank connection / List of supported banks. You can search by country: the institutions available in this country will show up in alphabetical order. You can also use the search on the top to look for your bank by name.
2. Connect to your account. In most cases, this will redirect you to the bank/service’s page to log in, then back to Toshl. In some cases, it requires entering the username and password. Some banks may require additional security steps like a randomly generated code.
3. Choose the date, from which onward you would like the data imported. This is important if you’ve been tracking some of these accounts manually before. Pick a date from which you’d like to switch to automatic and import from that date onward. By default, Toshl will import all available past data. From how far back the data can be imported will differ from bank to bank. With most bank connections either 1 year or 2 months of data are available, but this can vary among the banks.
4. See the incomes and expenses fly in. In a few moments, your financial accounts and transactions will be imported from your account, automatically categorized and tagged.
Connection troubleshooting tips:
If you get an “invalid credentials” error when connecting the bank or financial service, please first log in to your online bank and make sure that you use the same credentials on the bank connection login screen in the Toshl app. Check the full text of the reported error, sometimes they contain more specific information on what went wrong or even instructions on how to resolve the error.
When your bank requires multi-factor authentication, e.g. a randomly generated code in addition to your password, please keep in mind that these codes are usually time-sensitive and need to be entered quickly. In most cases, the code is valid just for 30 seconds. When factoring in the time needed to receive, display and send it, you probably have a bit more than 20 seconds to enter it and hit submit.
If you still experience difficulties in connecting your bank or financial service in the Toshl app, please contact us at support@toshl.com.
Privacy & security
Toshl is dedicated to protecting your data and your privacy. We take numerous technological and organisational precautions to make sure that the data remains safe. We also work with reliable FinTech partners to enable and maintain bank connections. These companies are Salt Edge and Plaid. While there is some overlap of coverage, if your bank is in the United States, Canada or the United Kingdom it’s most likely covered by Plaid. Salt Edge provides integrations most of the other connections around the world.
When you enter your bank credentials to connect, Toshl itself does not see or store the credentials. Where you are redirected to your bank’s website to authenticate, only the bank sees your credentials and sends us a confirmation they’re correct. Where banks don’t offer modern connections and authentication (official APIs), the credentials are saved and kept safe by our connection partners. This is needed to enable the bank connection to keep automatically updated with new data in the background. When you remove the connection, the credentials are deleted as well. You can read more about our policies and precautions we take on our Privacy Policy page.
2. Review and correct entries from automatic accounts if needed
When each transaction is imported, it’s automatically analyzed, so the information can be made more useful for you. It’s first categorized and tagged. Toshl also detects if it’s perhaps a transfer between your own accounts, rather than an expense or income. Sometimes, even the location of the purchase can be determined and put on a map.
While this automatic detection works well most of the time, there’s a chance that not enough information is available. A lot of this analysis is based on the transaction description from the bank, so if very little information is included, correct transfer detection or categorisation gets a lot more difficult.
In such cases, the entry gets sent to review. There, you can determine if the information is correct or if something needs to be adjusted.
Transfer detection cases currently get sent to review. Categorisation adjustments can only be done on the entry list for now but will be included in the review process in future app updates.
Reviewing potential transfer entries
When you make a transfer among your own accounts, you move your money from one “bucket” to another. So it shouldn’t count as an income or expense, it’s your internal financial movement.
Normally, Toshl detects transfers automatically and matches the expense (on source account) and the income (on destination account) together.
If the system cannot be certain enough to make an automatic transfer match, entries from automatic accounts can be suggested for review. To complete the review:
1. Go to the “Bank connections” section in the main menu.
2. Tap “Review entries” below a connection.
3. Open an entry and tap “Expense” / “Income” or “Transfer”.
4. Click “Save”.
You can move back and forth between entries, so you can easily edit any if you change your mind.
Two entries need to be matched together to make a transfer: an expense on the source account, an income on the destination account. When you confirm the entry is a transfer, you’ll be offered potential entry matches on other financial accounts to match them into a transfer.
You can also just select the missing destination or source account and Toshl will create the other entry there and match it into a transfer for you. This comes especially useful if the bank doesn’t report your monthly credit card payment as an income on the credit card account, as often happens.
Cash withdrawals from ATMs are also transfers between accounts. In most cases, they should be detected automatically. If not, click on the ATM expense imported from the bank, click Make transfer, then select the Cash account.
You can also split an entry when reviewing. This is especially useful if you want to split a single purchase among several categories or tags. For example, if your grocery shopping appears as one big total payment, but you want to track your food, cosmetics, and booze separately.
To do that:
1. Tap “Income” / ”Expense” on Review entry.
2. Turn ON the switch “Split into multiple entries”. The usual splitting interface will show up and you can assign different amounts, categories, and tags.
3. Tap “Save” or the tick button.
You can also split on entry details. Just click the Split option.
Correcting categories and tags
If an entry wasn’t categorised correctly or wasn’t categorised at all (marked “unsorted”), you can edit the entry and set a different one.
Toshl will track your corrections of the categories and tags and match those changes to particular elements of the description. In other words, Toshl will learn from your past choices and apply them to new entries as they get categorised. This works best if the descriptions of the new entries are similar as well. In case you notice that the expense or income from the automatic account has an inappropriate category:
1. Tap on Expense or Income to open the entry details.
2. Tap “Edit”.
3. Tap the category label and change it into the category that fits the case.
We realize that no automatic categorisation system with such a variety of data and choices can be perfect. Anyway, we’re doing our utmost to improve and bring you the correct categorisation in the vast majority of cases. The more you use Toshl and adjust your categories, the more precise it will become. Learn more about categories that learn from you.
3. Track cash and manual accounts
Not all spending can be tracked fully automatically yet. There’s cash and despite the thousands of bank connections on offer, there can still be banks that aren’t covered yet.
Add manual financial accounts
A financial account to track cash is added to Toshl by default. At least one manual account is always present, so you’re able to add expenses and incomes from the app.
You can add more manual accounts by clicking the accounts button on the top right of the web app, then click “Add account” below the account list.
Find more details on how to set your cash and other manual accounts in this tutorial. As time passes, remember to enter the expenses and incomes from manual accounts (e.g. Cash) on the fly to keep the balance on your manual accounts accurate.
Add your salary and other incomes (repeating incomes)
If your regular income comes on a manual account, you can enter them in advance and set them to repeat automatically so you don’t have to enter them manually each month. The salary will show up automatically in each period. Learn more about adding repeating incomes.
Add your regular bills (repeating expenses)
Add the repeating bills that you know will be coming each month on your manual accounts to make things more predictable, quicker and financial planning easier. Add things like electricity, internet bills, rent, gym memberships… all the regular expenses you have in your life.
If you would like to be reminded to pay those bills when they arrive you can also set up a reminder so the notifications will remind you when the bills arrive. Learn more about adding repeating expenses.
4. Set up budgets to control your spending
Now that entries from both automatic and manual accounts are coming in, nicely categorised, it’s time to set up budgets to regain some control over your spending.
Set up your main monthly budget
Take a look at how much you usually earn and spend each month in total. Based on what your goals are, pick a number lower than your income that will be your monthly spending goal. If you’re ok with your current spending, you can keep it much the same as it was in the previous months. If you want to spend much less than before, reduce the number accordingly. Notifications will remind you of your budget limit and spending trends, thus giving you the chance to take control of your spending.
Set up budgets for specific categories
Besides the main monthly budget, you can easily create monthly budgets aimed precisely at your spending weaknesses. For example, add a budget for the category Clothes & Footwear, then set the budget to equal the amount you can spend on your monthly clothing needs sustainably. Toshl monsters will warn you as you approach the limit, so you could stop and think before buying some related products. You can also set any budget surplus or deficit to automatically roll over into future months.
5. Enjoy precise tracking of your finances with Toshl app
That’s it. Finally, it is time to discover the gems of the Toshl Finance apps! Now that you’ve made sure all your expenses and incomes are flying in and added the budgets, the financial visualisations in Toshl will look a lot more fun.
Take a peek Monthly overview and River flow graphs to see how you’re doing this month at a glance. Found something odd? Dive deeper with Expense graphs to clarify your spending distribution among the various categories and tags.
Monthly overview graph
River flow graph
Expense graphs
Better yet, take a longer-term view with Planning and explore the trends of past years to better plan for the future.
Planning graph
Feel free to explore other advantageous features of Toshl app! You will find plenty of other hints in the Tutorials and Frequently Asked Questions.
As our monstrous friend Giuliano says: “The joy of truly knowing your finances comes second only to wearing strange hats.” How very true. His wife and children were not available for comment regarding his priorities.
Your finances are easiest to control when most of your tracking is automated. Less work for you, more time to improve your understanding of your general financial picture and more time to do whatever tickles your fancy.
This tutorial will help you set up your Toshl Finance account, presuming you’ll use an automatic connection to your bank, credit card or other financial services. We call it a bank connection to keep it short. Here, we’ll show you how to connect using the Toshl Android app. There are also tutorials for Web and iOS. You can also use Toshl with manual accounts only.
To use a bank connection you’ll need:
A bank, credit card or financial service supported in Toshl. Thousands are supported worldwide, it’s quite likely that yours is as well. New ones are regularly added. List of supported bank connections .
A Toshl user account upgraded to Toshl Medici which enables the bank connections and all the other useful features of Toshl Pro. Maintaining all these connections and improving the apps takes significant resources, so we cannot offer this completely free. A free 30-day trial is available though.
So let’s go into the action, here’s what you should do:
1. Add your automatic financial accounts
Most likely, the first thing you would like to do in your Toshl app is to connect a bank account and add a credit card or two to as well. To do so:
1. Find your bank, credit card or financial account in the list of bank connection. For that, just go to the Bank connections section in the main menu and tap New bank connection / List of supported banks. You can search by country: the institutions available in this country will show up in alphabetical order. You can also use the search on the top to look for your bank by name.
2. Connect to your account. In most cases, this will redirect you to the bank/service’s page to log in, then back to Toshl. In some cases, it requires entering the username and password. Some banks may require additional security steps like a randomly generated code.
3. Choose the date, from which onward you would like the data imported. This is important if you’ve been tracking some of these accounts manually before. Pick a date from which you’d like to switch to automatic and import from that date onward. By default, Toshl will import all available past data. From how far back the data can be imported will differ from bank to bank. With most bank connections either 1 year or 2 months of data are available, but this can vary among the banks.
4. See the incomes and expenses fly in. In a few moments, your financial accounts and transactions will be imported from your account, automatically categorized and tagged.
Connection troubleshooting tips:
If you get an “invalid credentials” error when connecting the bank or financial service, please first log in to your online bank and make sure that you use the same credentials on the bank connection login screen in the Toshl app. Check the full text of the reported error, sometimes they contain more specific information on what went wrong or even instructions on how to resolve the error.
When your bank requires multi-factor authentication, e.g. a randomly generated code in addition to your password, please keep in mind that these codes are usually time-sensitive and need to be entered quickly. In most cases, the code is valid just for 30 seconds. When factoring in the time needed to receive, display and send it, you probably have a bit more than 20 seconds to enter it and hit submit.
If you still experience difficulties in connecting your bank or financial service in the Toshl app, please contact us at support@toshl.com.
Privacy & security
Toshl is dedicated to protecting your data and your privacy. We take numerous technological and organisational precautions to make sure that the data remains safe. We also work with reliable FinTech partners to enable and maintain bank connections. These companies are Salt Edge and Plaid. While there is some overlap of coverage, if your bank is in the United States, Canada or the United Kingdom it’s most likely covered by Plaid. Salt Edge provides integrations most of the other connections around the world.
When you enter your bank credentials to connect, Toshl itself does not see or store the credentials. Where you are redirected to your bank’s website to authenticate, only the bank sees your credentials and sends us a confirmation they’re correct. Where banks don’t offer modern connections and authentication (official APIs), the credentials are saved and kept safe by our connection partners. This is needed to enable the bank connection to keep automatically updated with new data in the background. When you remove the connection, the credentials are deleted as well. You can read more about our policies and precautions we take on our Privacy Policy page.
2. Review and correct entries from automatic accounts if needed
When each transaction is imported, it’s automatically analyzed, so the information can be made more useful for you. It’s first categorized and tagged. Toshl also detects if it’s perhaps a transfer between your own accounts, rather than an expense or income. Sometimes, even the location of the purchase can be determined and put on a map.
While this automatic detection works well most of the time, there’s a chance that not enough information is available. A lot of this analysis is based on the transaction description from the bank, so if very little information is included, correct transfer detection or categorisation gets a lot more difficult.
In such cases, the entry gets sent to review. There, you can determine if the information is correct or if something needs to be adjusted.
Transfer detection cases currently get sent to review. Categorisation adjustments can only be done on the entry list for now but will be included in the review process in future app updates.
Reviewing potential transfer entries
When you make a transfer among your own accounts, you move your money from one “bucket” to another. So it shouldn’t count as an income or expense, it’s your internal financial movement.
Normally, Toshl detects transfers automatically and matches the expense (on source account) and the income (on destination account) together.
If the system cannot be certain enough to make an automatic transfer match, entries from automatic accounts can be suggested for review. To complete the review:
1. Go to the “Bank connections” section in the main menu.
2. Tap “Review entries” below a connection.
3. Open an entry and tap “Expense” / “Income” or “Transfer”.
4. Click “Save”.
You can move back and forth between entries, so you can easily edit any if you change your mind.
Two entries need to be matched together to make a transfer: an expense on the source account, an income on the destination account. When you confirm the entry is a transfer, you’ll be offered potential entry matches on other financial accounts to match them into a transfer.
You can also just select the missing destination or source account and Toshl will create the other entry there and match it into a transfer for you. This comes especially useful if the bank doesn’t report your monthly credit card payment as an income on the credit card account, as often happens.
Cash withdrawals from ATMs are also transfers between accounts. In most cases, they should be detected automatically. If not, click on the ATM expense imported from the bank, click Make transfer, then select the Cash account.
You can also split an entry when reviewing. This is especially useful if you want to split a single purchase among several categories or tags. For example, if your grocery shopping appears as one big total payment, but you want to track your food, cosmetics, and booze separately.
To do that:
1. Tap “Income” / ”Expense” on Review entry.
2. Turn ON the switch “Split into multiple entries”. The usual splitting interface will show up and you can assign different amounts, categories, and tags.
3. Tap “Save” or the tick button.
You can also split on entry details. Just click the Split option.
Correcting categories and tags
If an entry wasn’t categorised correctly or wasn’t categorised at all (marked “unsorted”), you can edit the entry and set a different one.
Toshl will track your corrections of the categories and tags and match those changes to particular elements of the description. In other words, Toshl will learn from your past choices and apply them to new entries as they get categorised. This works best if the descriptions of the new entries are similar as well. In case you notice that the expense or income from the automatic account has an inappropriate category:
1. Tap on Expense or Income to open the entry details.
2. Tap “Edit” icon.
3. Tap the category label and change it into the category that fits the case.
We realize that no automatic categorisation system with such a variety of data and choices can be perfect. Anyway, we’re doing our utmost to improve and bring you the correct categorisation in the vast majority of cases. The more you use Toshl and adjust your categories, the more precise it will become. Learn more about categories that learn from you.
3. Track cash and manual accounts
Not all spending can be tracked fully automatically yet. There’s cash and despite the thousands of bank connections on offer, there can still be banks that aren’t covered yet.
Add manual financial accounts
A financial account to track cash is added to Toshl by default. At least one manual account is always present, so you’re able to add expenses and incomes from the app.
You can add more manual accounts by clicking the accounts button on the top right of the web app, then click “Add account” below the account list.
Find more details on how to set your cash and other manual accounts in this tutorial. As time passes, remember to enter the expenses and incomes from manual accounts (e.g. Cash) on the fly to keep the balance on your manual accounts accurate.
Add your salary and other incomes (repeating incomes)
If your regular income comes on a manual account, you can enter them in advance and set them to repeat automatically so you don’t have to enter them manually each month. The salary will show up automatically in each period. Learn more about adding repeating incomes.
Add your regular bills (repeating expenses)
Add the repeating bills that you know will be coming each month on your manual accounts to make things more predictable, quicker and financial planning easier. Add things like electricity, internet bills, rent, gym memberships… all the regular expenses you have in your life.
If you would like to be reminded to pay those bills when they arrive you can also set up a reminder so the notifications will remind you when the bills arrive. Learn more about adding repeating expenses.
4. Set up budgets to control your spending
Now that entries from both automatic and manual accounts are coming in, nicely categorised, it’s time to set up budgets to regain some control over your spending.
Set up your main monthly budget
Take a look at how much you usually earn and spend each month in total. Based on what your goals are, pick a number lower than your income that will be your monthly spending goal. If you’re ok with your current spending, you can keep it much the same as it was in the previous months. If you want to spend much less than before, reduce the number accordingly. Notifications will remind you of your budget limit and spending trends, thus giving you the chance to take control of your spending.
Set up budgets for specific categories
Besides the main monthly budget, you can easily create monthly budgets aimed precisely at your spending weaknesses. For example, add a budget for the category Clothes & Footwear, then set the budget to equal the amount you can spend on your monthly clothing needs sustainably. Toshl monsters will warn you as you approach the limit, so you could stop and think before buying some related products. You can also set any budget surplus or deficit to automatically roll over into future months.
5. Enjoy precise tracking of your finances with Toshl app
That’s it. Finally, it is time to discover the gems of the Toshl Finance apps! Now that you’ve made sure all your expenses and incomes are flying in and added the budgets, the financial visualisations in Toshl will look a lot more fun.
Take a peek Monthly overview and River flow graphs to see how you’re doing this month at a glance. Found something odd? Dive deeper with Expense graphs to clarify your spending distribution among the various categories and tags.
Monthly overview graph
River flow graph
Expense graphs
Better yet, take a longer-term view with Planning and explore the trends of past years to better plan for the future.
Planning graph
Feel free to explore other advantageous features of Toshl app! You will find plenty of other hints in the Tutorials and Frequently Asked Questions.
As our monstrous friend Giuliano says: “The joy of truly knowing your finances comes second only to wearing strange hats.” How very true. His wife and children were not available for comment regarding his priorities.
Your finances are easiest to control when most of your tracking is automated. Less work for you, more time to improve your understanding of your general financial picture and more time to do whatever tickles your fancy.
This tutorial will help you set up your Toshl Finance account, presuming you’ll use an automatic connection to your bank, credit card or other financial services. We call it a bank connection to keep it short. Here, we’ll show you how to connect using the Toshl web app. There are also tutorials for Android and iOS. You can also use Toshl with manual accounts only.
To use a bank connection you’ll need:
A bank, credit card or financial service supported in Toshl. Thousands are supported worldwide, it’s quite likely that yours is as well. New ones are regularly added. List of supported bank connections (with search).
A Toshl user account upgraded to Toshl Medici which enables the bank connections and all the other useful features of Toshl Pro. Maintaining all these connections and improving the apps takes significant resources, so we cannot offer this completely free. A free 30-day trial is available though.
So let’s go into the action, here’s what you should do:
1. Add your automatic financial accounts
Most likely, the first thing you would like to do in your Toshl app is to connect a bank account and add a credit card or two to as well. To do so:
1. Find your bank, credit card or financial account in the list of bank connections. You can browse by country. First, 12 popular institutions in the country will show up. There’s also a full alphabetical list of available banks below. You can also use the search on the top to look for your bank by name.
2. Connect to your account. In most cases, this will redirect you to the bank/service’s page to log in, then back to Toshl. In some cases, it requires entering the username and password. Some banks may require additional security steps like a randomly generated code.
3. Choose the date, from which onward you would like the data imported. This is important if you’ve been tracking some of these accounts manually before. Pick a date from which you’d like to switch to automatic and import from that date onward. By default, Toshl will import all available past data. From how far back the data can be imported will differ from bank to bank. With most bank connections either 1 year or 2 months of data are available, but this can vary among the banks.
4. See the incomes and expenses fly in. In a few moments, your financial accounts and transactions will be imported from your account, automatically categorized and tagged.
Connection troubleshooting tips:
If you get an “invalid credentials” error when connecting the bank or financial service, please first log in to your online bank and make sure that you use the same credentials on the bank connection login screen in the Toshl app. Check the full text of the reported error, sometimes they contain more specific information on what went wrong or even instructions on how to resolve the error.
When your bank requires multi-factor authentication, e.g. a randomly generated code in addition to your password, please keep in mind that these codes are usually time-sensitive and need to be entered quickly. In most cases, the code is valid just for 30 seconds. When factoring in the time needed to receive, display and send it, you probably have a bit more than 20 seconds to enter it and hit submit.
If you still experience difficulties in connecting your bank or financial service in the Toshl app, please contact us at support@toshl.com.
Privacy & security
Toshl is dedicated to protecting your data and your privacy. We take numerous technological and organisational precautions to make sure that the data remains safe. We also work with reliable FinTech partners to enable and maintain bank connections. These companies are Salt Edge and Plaid. While there is some overlap of coverage, if your bank is in the United States, Canada or the United Kingdom it’s most likely covered by Plaid. Salt Edge provides integrations most of the other connections around the world.
When you enter your bank credentials to connect, Toshl itself does not see or store the credentials. Where you are redirected to your bank’s website to authenticate, only the bank sees your credentials and sends us a confirmation they’re correct. Where banks don’t offer modern connections and authentication (official APIs), the credentials are saved and kept safe by our connection partners. This is needed to enable the bank connection to keep automatically updated with new data in the background. When you remove the connection, the credentials are deleted as well. You can read more about our policies and precautions we take on our Privacy Policy page.
2. Review and correct entries from automatic accounts if needed
When each transaction is imported, it’s automatically analyzed, so the information can be made more useful for you. It’s first categorized and tagged. Toshl also detects if it’s perhaps a transfer between your own accounts, rather than an expense or income. Sometimes, even the location of the purchase can be determined and put on a map.
While this automatic detection works well most of the time, there’s a chance that not enough information is available. A lot of this analysis is based on the transaction description from the bank, so if very little information is included, correct transfer detection or categorisation gets a lot more difficult.
In such cases, the entry gets sent to review. There, you can determine if the information is correct or if something needs to be adjusted.
Transfer detection cases currently get sent to review. Categorisation adjustments can only be done on the entry list for now but will be included in the review process in future app updates.
Reviewing potential transfer entries
When you make a transfer among your own accounts, you move your money from one “bucket” to another. So it shouldn’t count as an income or expense, it’s your internal financial movement.
Normally, Toshl detects transfers automatically and matches the expense (on source account) and the income (on destination account) together.
If the system cannot be certain enough to make an automatic transfer match, entries from automatic accounts can be suggested for review. To complete the review:
1. Go to the “Bank connections” section in the main menu.
2. Click “Review entries” below a connection.
3. Open an entry and click “Expense” / “Income” or “Transfer”.
4. Click “Save”.
You can move back and forth between entries, so you can easily edit any if you change your mind.
Two entries need to be matched together to make a transfer: an expense on the source account, an income on the destination account. When you confirm the entry is a transfer, you’ll be offered potential entry matches on other financial accounts to match them into a transfer.
You can also just select the missing destination or source account and Toshl will create the other entry there and match it into a transfer for you. This comes especially useful if the bank doesn’t report your monthly credit card payment as an income on the credit card account, as often happens.
Cash withdrawals from ATMs are also transfers between accounts. In most cases, they should be detected automatically. If not, click on the ATM expense imported from the bank, click Make transfer, then select the Cash account.
You can also split an entry when reviewing. This is especially useful if you want to split a single purchase among several categories or tags. For example, if your grocery shopping appears as one big total payment, but you want to track your food, cosmetics, and booze separately.
To do that:
1. Click “Income” / ”Expense” on Review entry.
2. Turn ON the switch “Split into multiple entries”. The usual splitting interface will show up and you can assign different amounts, categories, and tags.
3. Click “Save” or the tick button.
You can also split on entry details. Just click the Split option.
Correcting categories and tags
If an entry wasn’t categorised correctly or wasn’t categorised at all (marked “unsorted”), you can edit the entry and set a different one.
Toshl will track your corrections of the categories and tags and match those changes to particular elements of the description. In other words, Toshl will learn from your past choices and apply them to new entries as they get categorised. This works best if the descriptions of the new entries are similar as well. In case you notice that the expense or income from the automatic account has an inappropriate category:
1. Click on Expense or Income to open the entry details.
2. Click “Edit”.
3. Click the category label and change it into the category that fits the case.
We realize that no automatic categorisation system with such a variety of data and choices can be perfect. Anyway, we’re doing our utmost to improve and bring you the correct categorisation in the vast majority of cases. The more you use Toshl and adjust your categories, the more precise it will become. Learn more about categories that learn from you.
3. Track cash and manual accounts
Not all spending can be tracked fully automatically yet. There’s cash and despite the thousands of bank connections on offer, there can still be banks that aren’t covered yet.
Add manual financial accounts
A financial account to track cash is added to Toshl by default. At least one manual account is always present, so you’re able to add expenses and incomes from the app.
You can add more manual accounts by clicking the accounts button on the top right of the web app, then click “Add account” below the account list.
Find more details on how to set your cash and other manual accounts in this tutorial. As time passes, remember to enter the expenses and incomes from manual accounts (e.g. Cash) on the fly to keep the balance on your manual accounts accurate.
Add your salary and other incomes (repeating incomes)
If your regular income comes on a manual account, you can enter them in advance and set them to repeat automatically so you don’t have to enter them manually each month. The salary will show up automatically in each period. Learn more about adding repeating incomes.
Add your regular bills (repeating expenses)
Add the repeating bills that you know will be coming each month on your manual accounts to make things more predictable, quicker and financial planning easier. Add things like electricity, internet bills, rent, gym memberships… all the regular expenses you have in your life.
If you would like to be reminded to pay those bills when they arrive you can also set up a reminder so the notifications will remind you when the bills arrive. Learn more about adding repeating expenses.
4. Set up budgets to control your spending
Now that entries from both automatic and manual accounts are coming in, nicely categorised, it’s time to set up budgets to regain some control over your spending.
Set up your main monthly budget
Take a look at how much you usually earn and spend each month in total. Based on what your goals are, pick a number lower than your income that will be your monthly spending goal. If you’re ok with your current spending, you can keep it much the same as it was in the previous months. If you want to spend much less than before, reduce the number accordingly. Notifications will remind you of your budget limit and spending trends, thus giving you the chance to take control of your spending.
Set up budgets for specific categories
Besides the main monthly budget, you can easily create monthly budgets aimed precisely at your spending weaknesses. For example, add a budget for the category Clothes & Footwear, then set the budget to equal the amount you can spend on your monthly clothing needs sustainably. Toshl monsters will warn you as you approach the limit, so you could stop and think before buying some related products. You can also set any budget surplus or deficit to automatically roll over into future months.
5. Enjoy precise tracking of your finances with Toshl app
That’s it. Finally, it is time to discover the gems of the Toshl Finance apps! Now that you’ve made sure all your expenses and incomes are flying in and added the budgets, the financial visualisations in Toshl will look a lot more fun.
Take a peek Monthly overview and River flow graphs to see how you’re doing this month at a glance. Found something odd? Dive deeper with Expense graphs to clarify your spending distribution among the various categories and tags.
Better yet, take a longer-term view with Planning and explore the trends of past years to better plan for the future.
Feel free to explore other advantageous features of the Toshl app! You will find plenty of other hints in the Tutorials and Frequently Asked Questions.
As our monstrous friend Giuliano says: “The joy of truly knowing your finances comes second only to wearing strange hats.” How very true. His wife and children were not available for comment regarding his priorities.
Summertime. We are craving for it in the frosty winter evenings, we are waiting for it in the rainy spring mornings. When the desired season finally comes, we are constantly looking for an air-conditioned shelter: at home, office or… shopping mall.
Summer is meant to be vacation time. It is calling upon us to go on sparkling adventures: traveling, visiting open-air events, hanging out with our friends… shopping. All this can be very appealing. At the same time, the long wish-lists push us to spend more in this season. Surely, there are ways to spend less in summer. We have already wrote about how to spend less on a summer trip in one of our previous blog posts. Today we are going to look at another challenge — shopping.
Shopping therapy and its traps
We tend to overspend on special occasions. Why wouldn’t you indulge a bit more on vacations? It’s a case where our inner wishes match the intentions of the sales industry.
In sales, the summer is also known as a season of discounts and special offerings. Thus, if we go with this flow, we might end up overspending. And we might buy lots of things that are not necessary for us.
It is true that if we feel bad, getting a new thing might improve our mood immediately. Shopping provokes us to imagine ourselves in a “better” life, where we’re dressed in fancy clothes and surrounded by pleasant-looking things. Purchasing makes those dreams seem real.
And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with it: as proved by many great athletes, visualization can boost our performance and reduce anxiety. On the other hand, this shopping effect does not stay long enough to make us really happy. Moreover, when you tend to shop impulsively, you risk overspending your budget. In some cases, if the pattern of thoughtless shopping behaviour repeats quite frequently, it might be a sign of an addiction.
So, how to resist summer shopping when thousands of shops are offering incredible discounts? Of course, you can give in and buy the things you don’t need, often can’t afford. But how do you get rid of this budget-killing habit?
Track and analyse your expenses
Experts say that the most effective first step for changing this habit is to identify why and how your shopping initially became a problem. They suggest starting to write a journal to keep track of our triggers.
If you keep tracking your expenses on a daily basis, you’ll discover the trends in your spending. Just check the Expense graphs. This chart will easily visualise your spending habits. If the category “Clothing & Footwear” is getting the largest space on the chart, it is an alarm. Reawake your willpower and limit yourself.
Next time you see a new purse with a -70% or a new tablet with a -50% discount, try to think twice if you really need to buy any. In most cases, choosing one thing means giving up something else. Money spent on one thing could be the money spent on another thing. And there are always better (smarter) alternatives. For instance, for many of us, having some funds in a retirement savings account will be more useful in a couple of years than having lots of useless things at our apartments.
University of Georgia’s Dr. Matt J. Goren suggests dividing our potential expenses into wants and needs while budgeting. In simple words: needs are “required stuff” (a necessity to buy a new laptop if your old one is broken and cannot be fixed) and wants are always the “fun stuff” (a desire to get a newer laptop when you still have a working one).
According to Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, when we satisfy our lower levels of needs (physiological and safety needs), we get motivated enough to reach the higher levels (love, self-respect, and self-actualization). This way, we feel happier if our basic needs are covered.
This applies to our fixed needs — such as food. Essentially, we are more vital and productive when we aren’t hungry. It can refer to variable needs as well, such as emergency expenses — a new substitute for a worn-out device. If you’re a freelancer and your laptop gets broken, you might have an urgent expense related to your job security.
Fixed needs are the stuff we can’t deny ourselves in everyday life, but we definitely can spend less on it. Variable needs such as any unexpected expenses are less pleasant for our pocket. If you plan some reserves in your budget for emergency cases, you will go through any stressful event having less negative emotions.
When we spend on our wants, we can feel even happier. The thing is the duration of happiness depends on the type of want.
Fixed wants are our daily expenses and are usually the result of our habits. For instance, every day you stop by a coffee place and buy some fancy drink (a premium quality espresso). When you discover that 500 g package of this coffee can be purchased at the local grocery store for a price you pay for the two cups at the coffee place, you will be surprised how much money you could have saved just drinking this coffee at home. The thing you need to do is to modify your daily premium espresso ritual. You might buy your favourite coffee at the grocery store and enjoy it at any time.
No, we should not neglect our wants. Covering some of the variable wants can motivate us and make us feel good. For instance, you might get inspired by the trip to Spain. The memories from this trip will stay longer than memories from buying a new pair of shoes. Buying experiences instead of things can contribute to our mental well-being.
All in all, if we reduce spending on our fixed needs and fixed wants and plan some costs for our variable needs, we’ll have more money on our variable wants. As a result, we could afford enriching experiences such as postgraduate education or opening our own company and grow as personalities. To get to this goal, budgeting your expenses is a really good start.
For starters, find the Achilles heel of your spending: check your expenses graph and find which of your expenses really stand out. You can easily create a monthly budget aimed precisely at your spending weakness, for example, Clothes & Footwear, then set the budget to equal the amount you can spend on your monthly clothing needs. Toshl monsters will warn you as you approach the limit, so you could stop and think before buying some related product impulsively. Moreover, if you don’t go over the budget limit, you’ll definitely feel relieved. And all the summer sales ads will pass as a pointless buzz.
Already hot, eh? If you read these lines drinking a juice at the shopping mall, just remember to spend smart at the summer sales, track your expenses precisely and make budgets in advance. But whatever you do: don’t forget to enjoy your summertime. Make it magic. ;)
