While we did our best to cover most cases of what kind of spending and earning you can do, we all have our individual circumstances. That’s why we made it easy to add new categories and tags, or modify the existing ones. This tutorial will help you tweak your category and tag system just the way you like it, as well as introduce some more general principles of expense and income categorisation in Toshl.

First, the basic rules:

1. Each entry (expense or income) must have a category

2. There can be only one category on each entry

3. Tags are optional

4. An entry can have multiple tags

5. Expense and income categories and tags are separate

6. Any tag can be used with any category, but just among the same type (rule 5.)

You can see these rules in action when adding an expense. Amount, category, date and account (if you have more than 1) are the required information to save a new expense.

All the categories and tags that you’ve used in the selected time span will show up on the Expenses and Incomes sections.

What about the entire system? ALL the categories and tags, even those that you haven’t used?

Click on the “Edit categories” button.

Each of the squares represents one category. The categories are sorted alphabetically. You can also see how many expenses or incomes use that category and how many tags are usually used with it. Why “usually”? Eeeeasy young padawan, we’ll get there soon. Click on one of the squares to open category details.

The tags that you see on category details are put there because you most likely use them together with that category. Categories and tags are not strictly hierarchical and a tag can be used on an entry together with any category. For example: if I put the tag “books” into category “Leisure”, it doesn’t mean that I can’t use the tag “books” together with category “Gifts” on a different expense. Tags are put into categories merely to help you better suggest the right tags when adding an entry.

For example, when you’re adding an expense and you have already chosen the category “Food & Drinks” and you then click in the tags field, the tags that will be suggest the first, are the ones which were put in that category, weighed by how often you use them. You can choose any tag you like though, even if it was put in a different category.

 

Click on the last of the category squares, with the + sign on it. Pick a title for the category and save. That’s it.

You can also add new categories when adding a new expense or income. Just type it into the category field and press Enter to add it as a new category.

Click on the category square to get the details.

Click on the “Edit” button top right.

You can rename the category by typing a new title and saving it.

Click on the category square to get the details. Click on the “Edit” button top right. Click the Delete button.

If you have expenses that still use this category, Toshl will ask you what to do with them. You can choose to assign them all a different category or delete the expenses as well. Consider this carefully, it cannot be undone.

When looking at all the categories, drag and drop one category square on top of the other. Toshl will ask you to confirm the merging.

The category title that will be kept is the second one, onto which you have dragged the first category to. All the expenses from the first category will then be marked with the new – merged category.

Click on a category. Click on “Add a new tag”, pick a title for the tag. Save.

You can also add new tags when adding a new expense or income. Just type it into the tag field and press Enter to add it as a new tag.

Click on a category, in category details click on the tag you want to rename. Click “Edit tag”.

Pick a new tag title and save.

Click on a category, in category details click on the tag you want to delete. Click “Edit tag”.

Click on the “Delete” button.

If any expenses use this tag it will simply be removed from the expense. The expense will continue to exist.

Click on a category, in category details click on the tag you want to move. Click “Move to another category”.

Moving the tag to another category will not alter your expenses in any way. This is simply so we better know which tags to suggest when adding an expense and you have already chosen a category.

Click on a category, in category details click on the tag you want to merge. Click “Merge with this category”.

When you merge with the category, the tag will cease to exist and will be removed on all the entries that use it.

There are some tags that are often used across many categories and can’t fit into a single one. We like to call them “meta-tags”. A typical example of this would be the “travel” tag which can be used with almost any sort of expense while you’re traveling. Another typical example would be tags that you use to note the person who paid.

It doesn’t matter if you put them in a single category, since you can still use that tag with any other as well. But to make things clearer, especially for those who migrated from Toshl v1, we added the option to keep tags out of a category altogether.

Click on a category, in category details click on the tag you want to leave outside. Click “Leave tag outside of categories”.

To merge a tag, first click on a tag, then click “Merge with tag”. This will open a window where you can choose among your other tags, to find the one to merge your selected tag with. You can merge two tags or multiple ones.

The suggested title of the new – merged – tag will be based on the second tag you chose for merging. You can however change the title of the new tag to whatever you want. After the merging is confirmed, all expenses or incomes that previously used one of the tags you selected for merging, will now use the new tag.

This option exists more as migration help for people who have migrated their data from the Toshl v1 where multiple financial accounts were not available. If you used a tag as an extra tag that noted which account it was spent from (e.g. credit card, bank account, cash etc.) you can now convert that tag into a financial account.

Use this only on tags that you used along with other tags on an expense. The tag being converted to an account should not be the only one on a tag.

This feature will likely be removed in the future once everyone has finished the migration process from v1.