Toshl 2.0 mobile apps have a useful little trick up their sleeve. No matter where in the app you are, you can quickly add an expense by simply dragging the + button up and to the right in a circular motion. Depending on where you release the button, you can add an expense, income or a transfer.
If you haven’t yet, you can download the Toshl 2 iOS app here.
In Toshl Finance you can use practically any currency you want. We support 165 different currencies from around the world with hourly updated exchange rates and historical daily exchange rates going back more than 15 years. This in practice means that you can travel or move anywhere, enter local expenses or even change the main currency in which you use the apps. Toshl will have your back.
Add an expense, income or a transfer in a foreign currency
The most common way in which you’ll encounter foreign currencies is usually when adding an expense, income or a transfer. Tap the currency symbol next to the amount and a plethora of currencies shall open in a dropdown menu.
On the very top of the list are your 5 recently used currencies. Your main currency is there by default, as well as the 4 other currencies that you recently used.
Below the recently used currencies you’ll find all the 165 currencies in an alphabetical list. The name of the currency is always followed by the currency symbol or abbreviation, as it will be displayed on the expense details and lists. The last piece information is the standardised three-letter international code of the currency.
Quick hint: You can also use search to find the currency that you need quickly. Just tap the search field on the top of the list and start typing the name of the currency you’re looking for.
Among the many national and supranational (e.g. the Euro) currencies you’ll expect to find there’s also a few more unusual ones. If your job description includes 17th century pillaging on the high seas you might appreciate entering your incomes in troy ounces of gold (XAU) or ounces of silver (XAG). If your dealings are more high finance than high seas, then the International Monteray Fund’s special drawing rights (XDR), might be more up your alley. Let’s not forget the the favourite child of financial innovation in recent years, Bitcoin. It’s of course also available as a full fledged currency in Toshl.
Once you’ve chosen your foreign currency, you can tap the round “i” button next to it and you’ll be taken to the exchange rate screen. By default it shows the suggested exchange rate. The exchange rates are updated hourly and are a middle rate from a variety of sources.
You can of course enter a completely custom exchange rate of your choosing. This is especially useful when you’re exchanging your money locally in a foreign country or at a bank. They usually won’t offer the middle neutral rate, but one slightly in their favour so they can make a profit on the exchange. If you’ve found a good deal it will be only slightly in their favour, but the differences can be quite large.
To set a custom exchange rate, delete the suggested rate and start typing a new one if you already know it. You can also tap one of the other numbers on the screen, the amount in foreign currency, or the amount in your main currency. Type new numbers in one of those fields and the other two numbers will adapt to fit the data.
Confirm the rate by tapping the tick icon on the top right. When you come back to the Add expense screen, you’ll find it a bit changed.
Below the amount you can see a preview of how the amount this is worth today in your main currency, or the currency of the financial account your are adding the expense to – if it’s different than the main currency.
Exchange rates on repeating expenses
If you add a repeating entry in a foreign currency we’ll ask you how to handle the exchange rate. A new exchange rate can be applied on each day when the expense repeats or it can remain the same as the rate hen you first entered it. Of course you can still manually set the rate on an individual repeat of the entry if you so prefer.
Active currency
Once you’ve saved an entry, the currency that you chose has become your active currency. That simply means that the next time you’re adding an expense, this active currency will be suggested by default. It will remain your active currency until you add an entry with a different currency or change the active currency in the Settings.
You can select your previously active currencies with appropriate exchange rates again by selecting one of the five currencies in the recently used part of the currencies dropdown menu.
The main currency is most likely the currency of the country where you live, the currency in which you think. This is the currency in which all the graphs, sums etc. are displayed. You can have entries, budgets or account in different currencies, but they will always have an exchange rate so you can know how much they’re worth in your main currency when it’s all summed up.
There are circumstances where your main currency changes. Either you move somewhere else, your country adopts a new currency or you decide that you like decimals so much that you’re prepared to do all your thinking in Bitcoins from now on.
When changing a main currency there are 3 ways to do it:
– according to historical exchange rates (recommended)
– using one exchange rate
– changing the currency symbol, without changing the values
According to historical exchange rates
Toshl will check on which date the expense was entered and apply the exchange rate between the currency in which it was entered and the new main currency on that date. The entries will stay in the original currency on the lists, but the value in main currency and the sums will be adjusted accordingly.
Using one exchange rate
Toshl will suggest the exchange rate valid for today to convert all entry values to the new currency. You can also change the exchange rate to a completely custom rate of your liking. The entries will stay in the original currency on the lists, but the value in main currency and the sums will be adjusted accordingly.
Changing the currency symbol
This is mostly useful if you’ve started entering with a wrong main currency selected. The values are already in the new currency, you just want to change the symbol next to all the expenses in the previous (wrong) main currency. This approach will not update the entry values at all, it will just switch the currency symbol.
The first two options will apply the value changes to all entries (expenses, incomes, transfers) and budgets in the original main currency. You can choose whether you want to change the financial accounts in the old main currency to the new main currency as well.
Warning: In most cases there should be no data loss, but some custom exchange rates can be lost with multiple changes. For example: your main currency is the Euro and you have some expenses entered in Brazilian Reals. There is an exchange rate between those two currencies saved for each expense. If you then change your main currency from Euros to Reals, the exchange rate on those entries in Reals is now lost because the expense currency is the same as the main currency, so the rate can only be 1. If you then change back to Euro as the main currency, these expenses can have the historical exchange rate for that day applied again, but if you had entered a custom exchange rate before, it was sadly lost. It should only be a minor discrepancy for most, but if you often enter custom rates and change main currencies it is a thing to look out for.
Looking at an expense. Food & drinks, 10 € on the 21st… What was that? My stare at the expense grows emptier by the second, perfectly reflecting the emptiness of my memory. If I only remembered where I had spent that. Easy solution: add a location to expenses in the future and the problem will go away. Plus, I’ll get a pretty cool spending map in the end.
When adding an expense or income, tap the location button on the bottom left of the screen. The suggestions of nearby locations and venues will show up.
The locations displayed are the Foursquare venues that exist in your immediate surroundings. If you already see the venue where you spent your money, just tap on it and the location will be added with your expense. Save the expense and that’s it.
Clicking on the mini map on the expense details will open it in Apple Maps.
What if the right location isn’t on the list?
If the location isn’t on the list, but you’re sure it should be near, tap “More locations” below the list of suggestions.
You’ll get a longer list with more suggestions of venues around you. If it still doesn’t show up, or the actual location of the venue is different from where you are right now, try searching for it.
This works well if you’re adding an expense when you’re at the actual location, but if you’re already some where else, or want to make it more precise, we have another trick up our sleeve.
You can also specify the town or city where the expense took place. Simply type-in the name of the venue you’re looking for, add a comma (,) and add the town or city where the venue is. For example: “Costa Coffee, London”.
For even more precise searching, you can also paste in the coordinates to display the venues around that location. This option is only available in the Web App though. See the Locations blog post for the web app.
Locations map
Once you’ve been diligently noting your locations with the expenses for a while, a nice map of your spending activities will start drawing out in the locations section. Click on one of the dots and the details for that location will show up.
If you’ve been spending at a single location multiple times, these entries will be summed up on the location. Now you can finally know how much your crush on that cute waiter or waitress has been costing you.
Filtering locations and filtering by locations
The locations map, like all the data in Toshl, depends on the filtering options that you have set up. By default the map will display all the locations in your current financial month. Need to see where you’ve been spending all the time that you’ve been using Toshl? Set the time span to all time. Voila, all your stops, on one handy map.
In the web app you can also filter by tag or category, not just the time or accounts.
What about the sum for the entire franchise?
While this approach is great for tallying up spending at an individual venue, it comes a bit short if you would like to tally up all your spending at an entire franchise, not just a single venue. For example, to know how much have you spent at all the E. Leclerc stores, not just the one in Ljubljana. If you need that information, you can still add a tag with the franchise title to each such expense and all your expenses at that franchise will be summed up using the tag. There is something to be said about places that are unique, though. ;)
Update April 2021: A much improved system for exports an email reports is available now. See the post Email Reports, File Exports and The Unbearable Lightness of Being Informed for more details.
With Toshl Finance you can export the data you entered into many different formats and services. This tutorial will show you how to do that, as well as use some nifty filtering options to export just the right information.
You can export the data that you entered into PDF, Excel (.xls), Comma Separated Values (.csv) or send the export directly to Google Drive – Spreadsheet app and Evernote.
The data sent to Google Spreadsheets will be in the same spreadsheet format as for Excel, so it will be immediately imported there and available for editing.
The export to Evernote goes in the PDF format and is therefore read only.
First you need to decide which data you wish to export. By default, “All expenses and incomes” are selected, but you can narrow down the selection. While the list of choices can seem pretty long, it’s essentially a simple choice. Export expenses, incomes or both. You can narrow that down further, by exporting just certain categories or tags or everything other than certain categories or tags.
You can also filter the data by time span in accounts. Just as anywhere else in the app, tap the top right corner of the screen to display this type of filtering. You can set up any time span or combination of financial accounts.
Next, choose your preferred export format options. Keep in mind that they will arrive by email, as links to the export files that you can open in your web browser or an appropriate app.
All that’s left is to pick the email address where you want the exported data sent to. We suggest your account email by default, but you can add up to 10 different email addresses form your contact list.
If you prefer even nimbler filtering options for both incomes and expenses as well as filtering by locations, you can also export the data in the web app on toshl.com.
There you can also set up a monthly email report which will deliver your selected financial data exports to your email inbox at the end of the month.
Check out the web app version of this article for more on Financial Exports in the Web App.
Did you ever want to travel in time? Me too. Here’s how you can do that in Toshl Finance. At least when it comes to your financial history.
You can change the time span displayed in the iOS app in the right sidebar.
Tap on the indicator of time span and accounts top right, to open the right sidebar. You can also swipe left from anywhere on the right edge of the screen.
Then tap the red button with the name of the current month to get into the time span section.
The default time span is “My financial month”. If you haven’t been playing around with the time spans, your financial month will be the same as the calendar month. If you prefer to sync up your financial month with when you get your salary, you can change that to whichever day you like.
First, open the drawer on the right. Swipe from anywhere on the right edge of the screen, or tap the Accounts/time span button on top right. Then, tap the red time span button in the centre. The button will usually list the current month.
Keep in mind though, that this will also change when your monthly budgets start and end, all the monthly graphs etc. We think that it’s still easier for most to leave the start of the financial month on the 1st, even if you get your main income on a different date. But if you’re really set on matching the dates, go right ahead.
Quick hint: If you change your financial month to somewhere in the middle of the month, the month will be named after the month that includes the most days. For example, if I made my financial month start on the 15th, my financial month of May will last from May 15th to June 14th.
In Toshl you can display any time span you want. If you click on the Custom time span tab, you’ll see the option to set the start and end date manually, or use one of the preset time spans for quicker access.
The preset options are based on calendar months. The presets for last 2, 3, 6 months will suggest those periods respectively, including the months that can be displayed from start to finish. You can also choose to display one of the recent calendar years, or even “All time”.
All time includes the time span from 1. 1. 1970 until today’s date. All the future cannot be included automatically in all time. If you have endlessly repeating expenses for example, that would mean displaying an infinite number of expenses, a possibility at which even the most adventurous Toshl monsters baulk at.