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.
Adding locations to expenses is a bit better in the mobile app, because you’re adding on the go and the location on your mobile phone is more accurate. But it can easily be done in the the web app as well.
When adding an expense or income, click Show more, to display all the options. The first field in the newly opened options is the location. When you click into the field, the suggestions of nearby locations and venues 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 click 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 Google 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, click the link “More nearby locations…” below the list of suggestions.
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.
By default the search will look for places around your current location, usually limited roughly to the town or city where you are at the moment.
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”.
If you would like to make the location suggestions even more precise, we have another trick up our sleeve. You can paste in the coordinates. The easiest way to find them is to open Google Maps, click somewhere on the map and copy the coordinates that show up below the Google Maps search field top left.
Then paste these coordinates into the locations field on Toshl. The suggested locations which will show up below will all be based around the coordinates that you pasted. You can also save the expense with just the coordinates, but if you want the location to show up on the map later, you will have to choose one of the Foursquare venues.
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 for fuel all the time that you’ve been using Toshl? Set the time span to all time, then click the filtering options top right and set it to display only expenses with the tag fuel. Voila, all your pump stops, on one handy map.
The filtering also works the other way around. Anywhere in the Toshl web app you can set up the filters to only display your spending at a certain location. This can produce pretty interesting graphs for locations where you have a more diverse spending, or if you need a simple PDF export of your spending at an individual place.
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. ;)