Toshl Finance Blog

Toshl Tote Bags Come into Existence. Universe Pleased.

The northern hemisphere does not feel northern at all these days. Summertime is upon us and Toshl monsters are heading to the beach. To impress all the monsterettes at the seaside, they needed a stylish yet sturdy bag. At the same time it needed to safely carry their cigars and rum for just the right moment when the sun gently kisses the sea on the horizon.

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Thus they created the Toshl tote bag. Made from 100% cotton, thick and strong enough to never buckle under the weight of your towels and rum bottles.

Of course it’s not only a beach bag, you can use it all year round as a shopping bag for your groceries. Make those ugly plastic one-time bags a thing of the past. Improve your shopping comfort and look better while doing so.

Enough with the teasing already! How can I get it?

The Toshl bag is sold with the 3-year subscription to Toshl Pro.
You can also combine it with the Toshl T-shirt and get both in the same pack.
Tote Bag + 3 year Toshl Pro subscription $59.99
Tote Bag + T-shirt + 3 year Toshl Pro subscription $69.99
Free shipping worldwide.

Get the bag now! 

Posted in Announcements, Goodies

Improving Financial Literacy – The Case of Hinkley Finance Club

The first step on the road to long term financial sustainability and peace of mind is education. Learning not to live above your means, saving, planning and budgeting properly are all very important skills often neglected by school systems around the world.

That’s why we were so delighted when we heard of The Hinkley Finance Club using Toshl Finance to help students learn about personal finances at the Hinkley High School in Aurora, Colorado in the United States. We gladly provided some tips about the apps (they didn’t really need much) and Toshl Pro accounts to help them with their noble goal.

Hinkley Finance Club

The Club is already in its eight year of helping students better understand their finances. They meet weekly, after normal school hours, over a five-month period (January through May). The program consists of a series of personal finance workshops on such subjects as: The Financial Planning Process, Budget and Spending Plans, Savings and Investments, Credit, Insurance, Financial Institutions and Services, and Vocations and Careers.  These workshops are presented by the Club’s founder, David McConico, who receives assistance from various volunteer presenters.  These assistants include Bob Noyes, a Hinkley math teacher, who was also instrumental in organizing the Club.

Here’s what they had to say about Toshl Finance:

“In conjunction with the Budget and Spending Plans segment, we looked at a number of smart phone applications that would allow users to record expenses in a convenient manner as well as allow for the comparison of such expenditures to a budget. We selected Toshl Finance.  Toshl had all the features we were looking for (it is particularly user friendly and the students immediately grasped how to use it) and it was available on multiple phone platforms.

Finally, we were impressed with Toshl’s Excel download feature. Next school year we want to use Excel with our advanced students and having their personal finance data on a spreadsheet will provide an excellent segue to this session.”

The Club requires its members to 1) complete quizzes and online financial education modules, 2) open savings accounts, and 3) compete in financial games that involve financial rewards.  Participants are provided with financial incentives (up to $300) for achieving certain objectives. Meals are also provided to the students as part of the program.

It’s run through the FEET Center, a local non-profit organisation, whose volunteers help educate the students and run the program. In the future, they hope to expand to other high schools in the Aurora district and even set up financial education competitions with scholarships for the top performing team members.

At Toshl we certainly wish them all the best in their mission and hope their example will be followed around the world. With better financial education, people can have more stability in their lives, less stress and more time and will to improve all round.

Big thanks to the everyone at the Hinkley Finance Club and David Milanesi for providing us with a summary of their activities.

Posted in Guest posts, News coverage

Export Financial Reports from Toshl to Evernote

We’ve updated the Toshl web app with a new export option. You can now export your financial reports directly to Evernote. It works just like the other export options. Simply click on the export link and then select Evernote in the drop-down menu.

You’ll be redirected to the Evernote site, where you can log in and authorise Toshl to create new notes and add content into them. Don’t worry, we don’t get permission to do anything else with your files other than to share the Toshl exports that you want to your Evernote notes.
Evernote logo
Like with all other exports you can specify which time period do you want the export to include. By default, that’s the current month, but it could also be all time, the previous month or any other time span that you specify by clicking on the title of the month.

Upload financial report to Evernote

You can also export reports for individual tags. Just go to the Tags section, click on the tag you want exported and then click on export. You’ll see that the export options will already be updated to exporting only the tag that you’re viewing.
Exports of financial reports to Evernote are sent in the PDF format.
We hope this comes useful. We’re very happy to integrate with another awesome service like Evernote, that we avidly use ourselves at Toshl.
Posted in Announcements, Tips & Tricks

To The Web and Beyond: Enhanced Budgets, History Graphs and Global Setting for Planned Expenses

Web, the final frontier. These are the voyages of Toshl Finance and it’s continuing mission to improve your finances and boldly budget like no one has ever budgeted before. In the previous episodes you’ve seen updates to our mobile apps with enhanced budgets. This time they’re coming to the big screen, to our toshl.com web app. But we’ve added and extra ingredient to the concussion: Budget History Graphs.

Budget History Graphs
Ever wondered what was your budget performance in the previous months? It was possible to check before, but the list of previous months could be rather dry. We’ve decided to enhance that and add a little flare with a graph of budget history for the previous months. See how you did, click on the individual month and even check out details for that month.
Budget History Graph
Expenses Included in the Budget
It’s vital to know which expenses are included in the budget to know where you really went overboard. Now you can have them all listed in the individual budget. Once a budget is selected you’ll see an arrow next to the title, just click it and the list of all the expenses included in the budget will unfold below, just like in the expenses timeline. Too much information? Click it again and the list will collapse again. Toshl will remember your choice for every budget so you won’t be bothered when you don’t need to be.
Expenses Included in Budget
Show or Hide Planned Expenses in All Graphs and Sums
When it comes to your finances you can’t just live in the moment all the time. Sometimes you need to take a good look into what will be going on in your financial future. With Toshl you can add your regular bills as repeating expenses or just add individual expenses to future dates for things you already know you will need to purchase in the future.
But when it comes to displaying that information you can have a bit of a dilemma. Do I want to see the state of my finances right now, or include all my expectations for the rest of the month as well? Now you can choose. Just click on the name of the month and on the bottom of the overlay you’ll see “Include planned expenses in graphs and sums” and an ON/OFF button next to it. When it’s ON all your future expenses will be included in the graphs, expense, income and balance sums, as well as the budgets.
It’s a global setting for the whole site so you only need to click once and we’ll remember your preference for the next time you log in.
Planned expenses in graphs
Minor enhancements
We’ve fixed and improved a great number of other things you might not notice at first glance, but count nonetheless. When you log in with Google we’ll remember you if you remain logged in with Google, so you need not click the log in button every time. Chinese characters again work well in exported PDFs, Hebrew is nicer in the graphs, email notifications work better and the list of enhancements goes on and on way past the event horizon.

Try it all out on toshl.com

Posted in Announcements

Toshl Finance for iPhone Out Now with Search, 165 Auto-refreshed Currencies, Improved Budgets and in 11 Languages

The new Toshl Finance for iOS has been confirmed and released on the App Store. We’ve added a lot of new features, fine-tuned existing ones and made the whole thing work faster. Just try tapping add expense for example. If the list of features seems familiar from the previous blog posts, it’s not a coincidence. We’ve now reached feature parity among the mobile apps we’re actively developing.

Search

You can now search your expenses and incomes by tags, description, amount. Type it in, tap and there you go. If you’d like to search in longer periods of time, don’t forget to first change the timespan to “all time” or some timespan of that nature.

You can find the search on any expense/income list. Just scroll up a bit and you’ll find it hidden below the title bar.

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Use ALL The Currencies 

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We’ve made some big changes when it comes to handling foreign currencies. We previously had about 30 currencies pre-entered and with daily updated exchange rates. The rest could be added as a custom currency. Now we’ve greatly expanded that list. Toshl now supports 165 currencies with exchange rates updated daily. We’ve got everything from the Afghan Afgani to the Zimbabwean Dollar. There’s even support for Bitcoin (BTC) if you’re into virtual currencies and the thrilling sport of financial bubble surfing. If you still can’t find your currency on the list among all these, you can still use a custom currency. We dare you. ;)
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As the list of currencies got a lot longer we’ve also added search through currencies as well as a nicer currency settings screen so it’s easy to differentiate between the currently active currency and your main currency. Best of all, these settings also sync with the web app now so you’ll never be caught with your pants down when trying to enter an expense during international travel. Unless that’s your thing.

Navigation improvements & facelift

You can now switch between the list of expenses by time and the list by tags using a neat little switch on the top of the list. You’ll find it right next to the search bar. We hope it will help people find and understand this switching more easily than before with the swiping between the two modes. We’ve also made the time span icon a bit more minimal and replaced the budget icon.

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List of expenses included in the budget

Budgets are great to remind you where your money went, but sometimes you just want to go WTF?!, why is this budget so low already? Now you can check. In the budget details, you’ll find a list of included expenses enabling you to see exactly where that budget vanished to and which expenses are the culprits.

Improved budget history

Knowing how you did with a budget in the months before and where you should improve is also very important. We’ve improved the history view, made the list nicer, but most importantly, you can see the details of the budgets from the past. You can even see which expenses were included in them.

Budget history

Localisation

At Toshl we have always aspired to treat citizens of the world equally and now we’ve taken a step further towards living up to our ideals. With your help we have localised the app into many different languages. The biggest thanks goes to the loyal users of Toshl who have helped to translate the app into their own languages.

Together we will continue to improve the translations, add some parts that are perhaps missing and bring new supported languages to the app. You can help out too by visiting translate.toshl.com. There, we have set up a super simple translation interface, where you can fill in the blanks for your language, even if it is just a few sentences at a time.

From today on Toshl for iOS will be available in Chinese (China – simplified), Chinese (Taiwan – traditional), Czech, English, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian.

Sadly we are still unable to use Toshl on iOS in the Toshl team’s native Slovenian, since Apple still hasn’t started supporting the Slovenian language in iOS.

Some of the other translations are already in progress and hopefully, with your help, we’ll be able to publish them soon.

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Performance optimisation & bug fixes

As always, we’ve worked on making Toshl Finance a lot quicker, stabler and error free. Some screens load a bit differently now. We’ve achieved significant improvements on the Add expense screen, especially on older devices. If you’re like us and compete with the credit card reader in shops to see if you can enter the expense faster than it can charge your card, this will greatly help with achieving victory every time.

Get Toshl Finance for iOS from the App Store

Posted in Announcements