Toshl Finance Blog

Email Reports, File Exports and The Unbearable Lightness of Being Informed

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.

email reports in monthly, yearly and monthly instalments
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.
  • Monthly overview graph.
  • 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.
  • Net worth in the past year (yearly report only)
  • Monthly balances in the past year (yearly report only)
  • Monthly budgets in the past year (yearly report only)
  • 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 / unpaid information
  • 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:

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.

Some features require Toshl Pro or Toshl Medici membership plans.

  • 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.

Free 30-day trials are available for all new users.

When Toshl monsters see the reports, they make cuts. Juicy ones.

Posted in Android Tutorials, Announcements, iOS Tutorials, Tutorials, Web App Tutorials