We have a bunch of filtering options available in Toshl Finance, all of which can be accessed by pressing the filtering button in the upper right corner of the web app. It has a little funnel icon on it.
Note that the filtering will overlay the list section, so make sure you close it (with the click on the same button) to see the expense list underneath, once you’re done with the filtering settings.
Filtering by account
Enable or disable displaying expenses and incomes on specific financial accounts. Accounts filtering is set to ‘All accounts’ by default, meaning the app is showing expenses, incomes, transfers etc. from all of your financial accounts.
The active setting is shown on the button, so you can quickly asses which accounts are enabled just by glancing at it.
If all are disabled, only the funnel icon will be displayed and you won’t see any data in graphs, lists, etc.
This setting is global and will effect every graph and list in the app – except the budget section, budgets filter only by category or tag. So if you think you are missing some data, check the accounts filtering settings to make sure the data is not just filtered-out.
Filtering by category, tag and location
The filtering options for the three are essentially the same, they just filter your data by a different attribute.
The category, tag and location filters won’t work with Monthly overview and River flow graph.
Three types of filtering are available for each attribute:
All (categories/tags/locations)
Pretty self-explanatory. All entries will be shown,
Select (categories/tags/locations)
Only entries which contain one of the selected (categories/tags/locations) will be shown.
Exclude (categories/tags/locations)
All entries, except the ones that contain the selected (categories/tags/locations) will be shown.
All of these filtering options can be combined and the effects are cumulative. Thusly, the result is an ever finer mesh through which the data is filtered.
For example:
Say we want to check how much ‘Cash’ we spent in May in ‘Food and drinks’ category.
First, we will navigate to May in the time span selector on top.
We covered time span in another tutorial: My Financial Month & Time Spans.
Second, we will open accounts filtering. We set all accounts to OFF by clicking the topmost switch next to “All accounts” and set only the ‘Cash’ account to ON.
If you’re really into switches, you can also disable all but the ‘Cash’ account one by one. Whatever floats your boat. Thus, we filtered the expenses to show only the ones purchased on ‘Cash’.
Third, we click on categories section below, click the tab ‘select categories’, then choose the ‘Food and drinks’ category. We are now seeing only expenses categorised as ‘Food and drinks’ and purchased with ‘Cash’.
Say we don’t want to see ‘groceries’, ‘icecream’, ‘beer’ and ‘coffee’. We click on tags, then ‘Exclude tags’ and select the ones mentioned above. We are left with proper meals, paid with cash.
If you change your mind about which tags you would like to filter by, click on one of the tags you selected and is currently displayed in the input field. The tag will then be removed from your filter.
Location filters work the same way as categories and locations. Use them to display only the expenses made at certain venues, or exclude certain venues.
There are also detailed filtering options present on the export & reports screen. Those filters are separate and filter just the data for exporting and reports.
That’s it! Check out the filtering, play around with it and always remember to keep an extra bussiness card in your wallet! Just in case you’d need another kind of “filter” altogether. ;)
It’s a good idea to have some extra business cards in any case.