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.
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.
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.
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.
