When you’re starting to track your personal finances, you sometimes need a try or two to know what you really want. For example, do you want to track spending with the names of all the restaurants or just keep it all under the food tag? To make adapting your system easier, we have now added simple tools to merge, add and remove tags on toshl.com.

Update: This is an outdated version of the article for the old Toshl web app. Please see the updated version here: Edit Categories and Tags (Web App)

 

How do I merge tags?

Let’s say you no longer wish to track tags “food” and “restaurants” separately. Simply go to Tags in your account and find the Merge expense tags below.

Then select “food” and “restaurant” from the dropdown menu, review them and then choose a name for the new, merged, tag. Since I’m feeling very utilitarian today, the new food tag shall be named “human fuel”.

If you wish, you can also check which expenses will be affected. The list will open in a new window and won’t interrupt your process.

All you have to do next is click Merge, confirm and there you go; all your “food” and “restaurants” are belong to “human fuel”. ;)

Toshl monsters sometimes take merging too far.

How do I add tags to multiple expenses?

Go to Tags in your Expenses or Income section and click on the Add expense tags below.

You can add tags to expenses with an existing tag, for example you want all the expenses tagged with “burek” (delicious Balkan pastry) to also be tagged with “food”.

Another way of using this functionality is to add a tag to all expenses within a date range. For example, I went on holiday to the Iranian city of Esfahan from 12th to the 25th of March 2013. I can then easily tag all the expenses within that range with the tag “Iran 2013”, so I’ll know exactly how much I spent during my travel there.

Review the expenses that this tag addition will affect, click Add tags, confirm and there you go. If you followed our example you can then see how much you spent in Iran in 2013 and know not to buy more than two silk carpets the next time you’re around.

How do I remove tags from multiple expenses?

As always, go to Tags and find the Remove expense tags below.

Select the tag you wish to remove from the dropdown menu. With expenses where there are multiple tags, the tag will simply be removed once you hit the Remove button. If there are some expenses, repeating expenses or budgets where the tag you selected for removal is the only one, then we’ll ask you what to do with those. You can either keep them and they will be left as they are, or you can choose to delete them, in which case the expenses and budgets themselves will be deleted. It cannot be undone, so tread with caution.

Review the expenses that will be affected, click remove, confirm and those pesky redundant no-good expense tags shall bother you no more.

These tools are only available in our web app on toshl.com. They are not something you would use every day and would add unnecessary complexity to our mobile apps. So you can make the changes that you wish on toshl.com  and after you’ve made your modifications, sync your Toshl Finance phone app. All the changes you have made will be reflected there.

All these instructions above work just the same for income tags, although if you’re like us, you will try to avoid mass removal of income. ;)