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 iOS app in the right sidebar.

Tap on the indicator of time span and accounts top right, to open the right sidebar. You can also swipe left from anywhere on the right edge of the screen.

Then tap the red 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 Accounts/time span button 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.

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.

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!? ;)