Toshl Finance Blog

Updates to the Toshl Finance Apps: Import, Toshl Pro, Search on Android

Posted on August 1, 2016

Import financial data into Toshl

We have recently added a much requested feature to the Toshl web app. You can now import your data to Toshl from your CSV, QFX, OFX and QIF files.

This means you can now import financial data you have in other apps, or data that your online bank provides.

The importing process is pretty straightforward: open toshl.com in your web browser and click the Import data link in the main menu on the left.

Then you can simply drag and drop your CSV, QFX, OFX or QIF files and confirm to import them. The latter three formats will import instantly, since these formats are already well structured for financial information.

CSV (comma separated values) files require an extra step, since the format is more general and the data can be structured in any number of ways.

Worry not, we’ve simplified CSV importing as much as possible. You’ll be shown a preview of the data from your file and you can then choose which fields from the CSV files match which type of data in Toshl. For example, select which field is a date, an expense description or an amount. Once you’ve selected those from the dropdown, you’re all set and can continue with the import.

It’s wise to create a new financial account for the imported data, so it doesn’t mix up with the rest of the data and you can easily turn it OFF or ON in the accounts sidebar.

The import feature is available for both free and Toshl Pro users.

Updated Toshl Pro plans

We have also made some changes to features included in free and Toshl Pro plans. We needed to find a better balance to be able to continue to develop and improve the Toshl Finance apps. Features that have been moved to the Toshl Pro plan are adding of automatically repeating entries, reminders, exporting in formats other than CSV (which remains free) and locking the app with passcode/fingerprint in the mobile apps.

The price of the monthly subscription has increased to $2.99 per month, but the yearly plan will remain priced at $19.99.

While we realise that this might come as an unfortunate surprise for some of you, we hope you can understand that developing and maintaining apps such as Toshl takes significant resources and a good balance needs to be struck so we can continue to offer you these services long into the future. We can only hope that you understand the reasoning behind our decision and continue supporting the development of Toshl. To infinity and beyond!

Updated Android app (2.0.4)

The Android app received an important update recently. The search functionality has been added, so you can now search for practically any info you would find on an expense, income or transfer.

To improve ergonomics and ease of use, we’ve also added another large Save button to the bottom of all the Add entry screens. It should make things a lot easier, especially for those of you with larger screens, no need to stretch those thumbs anymore!

There are tons of other improvements and fixes, too numerous too list all here. For example, tag selection is no longer cut off on some smaller devices, pull down list to refresh now fetches more data, users in Hong Kong now get the traditional Chinese localisation by default, the expense lists now load much faster…

Download the updated app on Google Play

Posted in Announcements

How to use the Budgets (Android)

Posted on July 18, 2016

Budget list

When you tap the Budgets section, you’ll see all the budgets that you have in the current time period.

Each budget has its own progress bar and shows how much of the budget is used and left this month. That way, you can quickly monitor the current state of all your budgets at once.

If you use monthly budgets, you’ll notice that budgets are displayed in two ways:

Monthly budgets for all expenses and monthly budgets for categories

The top budget is your general monthly budget for all expenses. The category budgets below each represent a percentage of the total monthly budget.

If you added up all the category budgets, they add up to the monthly budget for all expenses. That’s why the little progress bars beneath each category budget are of different lengths. Together, they would be the full length of the progress bar for the monthly budget for all expenses.

The categories for which you have not yet made a budget are covered in the “Remaining budgets” section. That way you get a picture of how your monthly budget for all expenses is distributed among all the categories.

All other budgets

All the budgets which are not monthly for all expenses, or monthly for a category, are displayed as individual budgets. They cannot be displayed in the upper part of the list as they don’t necessarily match up in time or scope with the other budgets. Such budgets can be interesting in their own right, but not immediately comparable to monthly budgets for all expenses or categories.

Filtering

Budgets displayed in the list are filtered just like any other content on Toshl.
Only budgets that have a budget period in the currently chosen time span will be displayed.
If you used the filtering option on the top right, only the budgets that fit those criteria will be displayed. For example, if you filtered to display only one category, only the budgets that track that category will be displayed. Same goes for tags and other filtering options, except accounts.

Don’t forget about the “Planned” ON/OFF setting in the time span settings in the right sidebar.

If it’s set to ON, the budgets will already include your planned expenses which aren’t yet due this month. If planned is set to OFF, only expenses that happened until today will be displayed.

Budget details

Let’s take a look into the details of an individual budget. We’ll take a look at a monthly budget for all expenses and see what all the graphs and data mean.

Title & budget amount

The title is pretty self evident, but it’s worth mentioning that they are generated automatically, based on the type of budget you created. If you want you can change it by clicking Edit in the top right corner of the screen.

The amount shown on top is the total amount for the budget for the given time period. You can use your main currency for the budget (recommended) or a foreign one, if it’s your travel budget while you’re abroad, for example.

Budget statistics for the current period

Used & planned: the amount of money that was already spent from this budget in the displayed time period. If it mentions “planned” it also includes the expenses that you have already added in the future of this time period, but weren’t due yet. For example, bills that haven’t arrived yet this month. If you want to see just the expenses until today, click the time span setting at the top of the screen and set the “Show planned expenses in graphs” setting to OFF.

Left: The amount of money remaining in this budget, that you have not spent yet.

Left per day: The amount of money remaining, divided by the number of days remaining in the budget period.

Budget overview graph

This graph takes a little bit of getting used to all the elements of it, but once you get the hang of it, you get a great feel for the real state of your budget in a single glance.

Progress bar and the blue/red lollipop

The blue-coloured background tells you how much of your budget still remains. In the beginning of the period it’s all blue, but as you add more expenses things heat up and it starts shrinking towards the right side. Kind of like a glacier. The blue lollipop shows the end of the progress bar and displays how much money is left in the budget.
If you surpass the budget amount you have set for yourself, the progress bar will start appearing from the left in red colour, with the red lollipop up front, displaying how much did you go over your budgeted amount.

The today lollipop

In the budget graph for the current period you’ll also see an upside-down lollipop in dark grey with “today” written on it. This lollipop shows current time compared to the whole budget period. The entire length of the graph is the entire amount of time in the budget period and the lollipop displays where you are now.

The red columns

These columns are daily sums of expenses. They show how much you spent on a given day in the budget period, telling you when you spent the most and helping you to find the main culprit of overspending. Click and hold the cursor over the graph to see the daily details. The taller and darker the column, the more was spent.

Compare the “money left” and “today” lollipops

Comparing the lollipops quickly tells you how you’re doing with your current budget. The blue lollipop tells you how much money you have left in the budget, the grey one tells you how much time you have left.

If they’re aligned or almost aligned, you’re right on track so far. You’re on the way to spend the almost exact amount of money you budgeted in this period.

If the today lollipop (grey) is way ahead of the money left lollipop (blue), then you’re doing great with your budget. You’ve spent less than you thought you will in this amount of time. If this happens a lot, perhaps it’s time to lower the budget amount.

If the money left lollipop (blue) is way ahead of the today lollipop (grey), then you’re not doing so well with your budget. You’re spending more than was expected. Time to reduce your spending, or if that’s not possible, make the budget amount larger next time.

If the lollipop has already turned to red, you have already spent more than the money you had put in the budget amount. The lollipop simply tells you by how much.

Budget type

Time period, Accounts Tracked, Budget Type

The 3 basic settings of the budget.
Time period: shows what kind of period of time does it track and how quickly it transitions to the next period, e.g. daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or one time. You can set a budget to a custom time period: e.g. every 2 weeks, every 3 months etc.

Accounts tracked: Whether the budget is set to track the expenses noted on all financial accounts or only some.
Budget type: Whether it tracks all expenses, those in specific categories, those using specific tags or excluding expenses some categories or tags.

Included expenses: Shows all the expenses that are counted in this budget. Which expenses are included of course depends on how you set the budget in the properties above.

The budget history graph

This graph shows the previous budget periods and the total amount of money that was spent in the period. By tapping and holding over the budget history graph you can also see more details for the period, including the amount of the budget, amount spent and how much was saved or lacking in the period.

The budget history list

Here you can see each one of your past budget periods. You can easily tell how much you exceeded or saved on a budget in a given period on the list. Tapping on one of the periods will take you to the budget details in that past period of the budget.

Toshl Pro budget limitations

People using the free Toshl are limited to adding 2 budgets, with Toshl Pro you can add as many as you like. If your Toshl Pro subscription expires, the extra budgets will be deactivated. The data will not be deleted, if you extend your Toshl Pro subscription you can continue using them normally.

pro_badge_beige Toshl Pro is available as one of these plans:

$1.99 / month
$19.99 / year
$59.99 / 3 years + free T-shirt

Learn more about Toshl Pro

Want to start budgeting, but don’t know where to start? Read our tutorial “How to Set Up Your Budgets and Control Your Spending” and you’ll be set up in a heartbeat. Maybe two heartbeats. It will be a few more heartbeats really. It’s just a figure of speech, get of my back, will you!? ;)

Posted in Android Tutorials, Uncategorized

Expense and Income Lists (Android)

Posted on July 18, 2016

Listing your expenses and incomes. Here’s how it works.

Expense in the list

The category, the tag(s), optional info like repeats and reminders followed by amount and currency.
Tap on it and you get to expense details where you can view, edit or delete the expense.

Pretty straightforward.

If you’re wondering about the icons on the expenses and incomes here’s what they are:
– Repeating expense. It will repeat automatically based on a setting of your choice. Open expense details or edit to find out more about the specific type of repeat.
– You can set to be reminded when your expenses come up, or some time before. Once the expense is due, the bell icon will be replaced by a red dot, warning you that the expense is still unpaid.
– Speaking of the devil… The red dot, warns you that the expense is still unpaid. Go into expense details, tap “mark as paid” and it shall go away.

Planned expenses

If you have any expenses entered on future dates this month, a special row will be shown on top of the list called “planned expenses”. You can open it to reveal which expenses are coming up this month. To add an expense into planned expenses, enter it is you would any expense, just set the date in the future of that month.

You can also choose to include these planned expenses into graphs or not.

Sorting by date, by category and search

Open the expense list. Collect your thoughts, gather courage, tap the magnifier icon next to the clock in the upper right hand corner of the screen.

You will find the option to search your expenses. Tap inside the field and search for pretty much any expense attribute.

Below the action bar and accounts/timespan indicator are the tabs to choose sorting by date or by category. By default, the expenses are listed by date. When listed by date, the expenses are listed chronologically, with the latest ones on top.

When listed by category, a list of all categories is shown. Categories with the highest sum of expenses are shown on top. This way, you’ll be able to locate your largest money sinkholes quickly.

Filtering data

As everywhere in the app, you can filter your data. Use the time span options to filter by time, or filter by accounts. You can find both types of filtering in the right sidebar. Tap on the time and account preview on the top right, or swipe from anywhere on the rightmost edge of the screen to activate it.

The web app offers a few more options for filtering. Use the web app to also filter by category, tag or location. More on this here.

Posted in Android Tutorials, Uncategorized

Currencies in Toshl Finance – Ounces of Gold Welcome (Android)

Posted on July 18, 2016

In Toshl Finance you can use practically any currency you want. We support 165 different currencies from around the world with hourly updated exchange rates and historical daily exchange rates going back more than 15 years. This in practice means that you can travel or move anywhere, enter local expenses or even change the main currency in which you use the apps. Toshl will have your back.

Add an expense, income or a transfer in a foreign currency
The most common way in which you’ll encounter foreign currencies is usually when adding an expense, income or a transfer. Tap the currency symbol next to the amount and a plethora of currencies shall open in a dropdown menu.

On the very top of the list are your 5 recently used currencies. Your main currency is there by default, as well as the 4 other currencies that you recently used.

Below the recently used currencies you’ll find all the 165 currencies in an alphabetical list. The name of the currency is always followed by the currency symbol or abbreviation, as it will be displayed on the expense details and lists. The last piece information is the standardised three-letter international code of the currency.

Quick hint: You can also use search to find the currency that you need quickly. Just tap the search field on the top of the list and start typing the name of the currency you’re looking for.

Among the many national and supranational (e.g. the Euro) currencies you’ll expect to find there’s also a few more unusual ones. If your job description includes 17th century pillaging on the high seas you might appreciate entering your incomes in troy ounces of gold (XAU) or ounces of silver (XAG). If your dealings are more high finance than high seas, then the International Monteray Fund’s special drawing rights (XDR), might be more up your alley. Let’s not forget the the favourite child of financial innovation in recent years, Bitcoin. It’s of course also available as a full fledged currency in Toshl.

Once you’ve chosen your foreign currency, you can tap the round “i” button next to it and you’ll be taken to the exchange rate screen. By default it shows the suggested exchange rate. The exchange rates are updated hourly and are a middle rate from a variety of sources.

You can of course enter a completely custom exchange rate of your choosing. This is especially useful when you’re exchanging your money locally in a foreign country or at a bank. They usually won’t offer the middle neutral rate, but one slightly in their favour so they can make a profit on the exchange. If you’ve found a good deal it will be only slightly in their favour, but the differences can be quite large.

To set a custom exchange rate, delete the suggested rate and start typing a new one if you already know it. You can also tap one of the other numbers on the screen, the amount in foreign currency, or the amount in your main currency. Type new numbers in one of those fields and the other two numbers will adapt to fit the data.

Confirm the rate by tapping the tick icon on the top right. When you come back to the Add expense screen, you’ll find it a bit changed.

Below the amount you can see a preview of how the amount this is worth today in your main currency, or the currency of the financial account your are adding the expense to – if it’s different than the main currency.

Exchange rates on repeating expenses

If you add a repeating entry in a foreign currency we’ll ask you how to handle the exchange rate. A new exchange rate can be applied on each day when the expense repeats or it can remain the same as the rate hen you first entered it. Of course you can still manually set the rate on an individual repeat of the entry if you so prefer.

Active currency

Once you’ve saved an entry, the currency that you chose has become your active currency. That simply means that the next time you’re adding an expense, this active currency will be suggested by default. It will remain your active currency until you add an entry with a different currency or change the active currency in the Settings.

You can select your previously active currencies with appropriate exchange rates again by selecting one of the five currencies in the recently used part of the currencies dropdown menu.

Main currency

The main currency is most likely the currency of the country where you live, the currency in which you think. This is the currency in which all the graphs, sums etc. are displayed. You can have entries, budgets or account in different currencies, but they will always have an exchange rate so you can know how much they’re worth in your main currency when it’s all summed up.

There are circumstances where your main currency changes. Either you move somewhere else, your country adopts a new currency or you decide that you like decimals so much that you’re prepared to do all your thinking in Bitcoins from now on.

When changing a main currency there are 3 ways to do it:
– according to historical exchange rates (recommended)
– using one exchange rate
– changing the currency symbol, without changing the values

According to historical exchange rates
Toshl will check on which date the expense was entered and apply the exchange rate between the currency in which it was entered and the new main currency on that date. The entries will stay in the original currency on the lists, but the value in main currency and the sums will be adjusted accordingly.

Using one exchange rate
Toshl will suggest the exchange rate valid for today to convert all entry values to the new currency. You can also change the exchange rate to a completely custom rate of your liking. The entries will stay in the original currency on the lists, but the value in main currency and the sums will be adjusted accordingly.

Changing the currency symbol
This is mostly useful if you’ve started entering with a wrong main currency selected. The values are already in the new currency, you just want to change the symbol next to all the expenses in the previous (wrong) main currency. This approach will not update the entry values at all, it will just switch the currency symbol.

The first two options will apply the value changes to all entries (expenses, incomes, transfers) and budgets in the original main currency. You can choose whether you want to change the financial accounts in the old main currency to the new main currency as well.

Warning: In most cases there should be no data loss, but some custom exchange rates can be lost with multiple changes. For example: your main currency is the Euro and you have some expenses entered in Brazilian Reals. There is an exchange rate between those two currencies saved for each expense. If you then change your main currency from Euros to Reals, the exchange rate on those entries in Reals is now lost because the expense currency is the same as the main currency, so the rate can only be 1. If you then change back to Euro as the main currency, these expenses can have the historical exchange rate for that day applied again, but if you had entered a custom exchange rate before, it was sadly lost. It should only be a minor discrepancy for most, but if you often enter custom rates and change main currencies it is a thing to look out for.

Posted in Android Tutorials, Tutorials

My Financial Month & Time Spans (Android)

Posted on July 13, 2016

Did you ever want to travel in time? Me too. Here’s how you can do that in Toshl Finance. At least when it comes to your financial history.

You can change the time span displayed in the Android app in the right sidebar.

Tap on the clock icon top right, to open the right sidebar. You can also swipe left from anywhere on the right edge of the screen.

Then tap the button with the name of the current month to get into the time span section.

My financial month

The default time span is “My financial month”. If you haven’t been playing around with the time spans, your financial month will be the same as the calendar month. If you prefer to sync up your financial month with when you get your salary, you can change that to whichever day you like.

First, open the drawer on the right. Swipe from anywhere on the right edge of the screen, or tap the time span button (clock icon) on top right.

Then, tap the red time span button in the centre. The button will usually list the current month.

Keep in mind though, that this will also change when your monthly budgets start and end, all the monthly graphs etc. We think that it’s still easier for most to leave the start of the financial month on the 1st, even if you get your main income on a different date. But if you’re really set on matching the dates, go right ahead.

Quick hint: If you change your financial month to somewhere in the middle of the month, the month will be named after the month that includes the most days. For example, if I made my financial month start on the 15th, my financial month of May will last from May 15th to June 14th.

Custom time spans

In Toshl you can display any time span you want. If you click on the Custom time span tab, you’ll see the option to set the start and end date manually, or use one of the preset time spans for quicker access.

The preset options are based on calendar months. The presets for last 2, 3, 6 months will suggest those periods respectively, including the months that can be displayed from start to finish. You can also choose to display one of the recent calendar years, or even “All time”.

All time includes the time span from 1. 1. 1970 until today’s date. All the future cannot be included automatically in all time. If you have endlessly repeating expenses for example, that would mean displaying an infinite number of expenses, a possibility at which even the most adventurous Toshl monsters baulk at.

Posted in Android Tutorials, Tutorials