Toshl Finance Blog

How to Create a Budget, Perhaps Make a Golden Pagoda

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Tutorial to help you start budgeting with Toshl and explore some most common uses of budgets. The surest way towards becoming a enlightened budgeting genius.

So you want to save some money or keep a closer eye on how much you’re spending. Setting up a budget is the easiest way to do it.

Tap the + button (top right) or shake the phone when in the Budgets tab.

There’s a couple of different ways to budget, depending on what you need. Let’s take a look at some common examples:

Budget for all expenses – monthly

Set up the maximum amount you wish to spend during the month. Hopefully that number is lower than your incomes. That’s important because it turns out that private citizens can run budget deficits for a much shorter time than governments can. It’s thus pretty wise to keep a bit of a surplus and save for the rainy days.

This budget will now track all your expenses within the month and warn you with some flaming red hues when things go overboard.

Budget for specific tags – weekly coffee

That caffeine habit is tough to kick, especially in the mornings when that extra energy boost is like mana from heaven. Now you can at least get a sense of proportion and try to limit your coffee spending by setting up some early warning signs. If you track coffee spending with its own tag you can set up a budget just for coffee and try to shake less when holding that cup.

Some Toshl users found strength to quit smoking by setting up a cigarettes budget. But it’s not just for vice, feel free to budget for any type of tag you wish to keep a closer eye on.

Travel budget – one time

Holidays can be a time to be a bit more relaxed with money, but it’s good to have a warning system in place when it’s getting tight. You know, just so you don’t end up on the streets of Yangon selling yourself just to earn that airplane ticket back home. True story! Not really.

Anyway, go traveling, set up a one time budget for all expenses with the start and end date of your vacations and you’ll know exactly how much you spent on the trip.

People of Yangon, Myanmar budgeted so well they were able to buy themselves a golden pagoda. ;)

 

These are just a few examples of the budget combinations you can use, there’s a lot more powerful options suited to your needs. You can combine any type of budget with a time period.

Budget types:

– all expenses

– for specific tags

– except specific tags

 

Budget time periods:

– one time

– daily

– weekly

– bi-weekly

– monthly

– yearly

 

Budgets with rollovers

One more thing to get you on your merry budgeting way. Your budget doesn’t have to reset each week or month. You can turn on the rollovers by selection the option “Move remaining to next budget”. That way if you’ve been especially good in saving on restaurants last month you can move those remaining funds to the next month and treat yourself to some proper nine-course dining with fine Slovenian wine at Skaručna. Suit yourself, but that’s what I’d do.

Posted in Budgeting, Tips & Tricks, Tutorials

We Are Ending The Development of Toshl for BlackBerry. Here’s Why.

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We’ve always been proud of Toshl working on multiple platforms. Our personal finance apps are available on iPhone, Android, Symbian^3, Windows Phone and, yes, BlackBerry. Lately, it’s become untenable and unwise for us to keep developing for BlackBerry and here are the reasons why.

First, I’m sorry BlackBerry users of Toshl. If it made sense for us to keep developing for BlackBerry we would, but sadly it doesn’t. The app will remain available and continue to work as-is, but there are many reasons why we cannot continue do develop for it.

The user experience is horrible

We try to create the best user experiences we can and BlackBerry has always been a sore spot. The whole user interface is outdated and quite honestly a pain to use, especially for people used to other, more modern mobile platforms. While that has been the case for a while, with the pace of development on other platforms, BlackBerry is sticking out even more in contrast. We want to put love in the products that we make. That makes us want to keep making it better and better, sadly we can’t muster up such motivation for BlackBerry anymore.

Our resources of time, money and energy are limited. We want to focus our efforts to where we can really make an impact and create great user experiences.

Platform in freefall, fragmentation

RIM is on the way out. They’ve been out-innovated across the board, their product line is stale. Not to mention the myriad of different devices with different resolutions, device-specific bugs and that BlackBerry network internet for which you have to apply to use, jump through bureaucracy hoops…

In the few cases where there seem to be glimmers of hope it’s too little, too late. The QNX-based PlayBook takes literally 5+ minutes to boot from personal experience, phones based on the BlackBerry 10 OS aren’t due until 2013 and even then it’s a question if it can gain some popular support. The first previews of the system look nice, but what is there to lure away users from other mobile platforms with more established app ecosystems to one that’s few years late to the game?

With QNX under the hood and a new UI it would require us to make a completely new app anyway. I wish them all the best, diversity and competition in the mobile arena is good for competition. But from what I’ve seen from RIM over the past few years I’m quite doubtful about the future prospects and mass market adoption. If they ever manage to get into the two digit market share area with BB10 we’ll be more than happy to reconsider and develop for the platform once again.

Toshl Finance for BlackBerry remains available
Toshl Finance for BlackBerry app will remain available online, the sync and all the functionality will continue to work as well. We simply won’t be making any further updates to the app in the future. We will try to provide support to our existing users in ways that we can help solve potential issues that don’t require us to update the app.

Toshl for BlackBerry on Toshl.com
Toshl on the BlackBerry App World

Death of RIM infographic

To shed some more light on the story of RIM, BlackBerry maker’s downfall here’s a infographic created by the friendly people at MBAonline. Quick correction, when the infographic was made, the stock price is listed ad $15, it has since fallen to $8.
Posted in Announcements, Development

How to Add an Expense in Toshl Finance

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This is a short tutorial explaining how to add an expense in Toshl and how tags work. Shouldn’t be complicated, but it’s good to have a reference if things get confusing.

Toshl monsters may look scary, but in reality they are really nice. If you’re new to Toshl, they will help you get started. Feel safe to follow their advice. If you still have trouble finding your way around Toshl, read on.

1. Tap the + button (top right) or shake when in the Expenses tab.

 

2. Add an amount, press Next and then add some tags. Toshl lets you add any tags you like so you can organize your finances the way you want. If you want to add a new tag, simply type in the tag field with the name of the tag you would like to add. You can add multiple tags, simply separate them by commas. If you already added some tags previously, they will show bellow so you can quickly select them again.

Tags are non-exclusive. You can add more of them at one. Just bear in mind that the expense will then be counted under both tags when you sort them.

 

3. You can then tap Save to save an expense immediately or tap Next for some additional options. You can change the date, add a description or set the expense to repeat. Yes, it’s really that simple.

Posted in Tips & Tricks, Tutorials

Why Publishing on the Windows Phone Marketplace is Like Walking Barefoot On Broken Glass

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We started developing Toshl for Windows Phone because we liked the platform and saw the potential in it. It’s a beautifully designed OS, even if the experience starts to wear a bit thin after a few weeks and a giant leap for Microsoft. Publishing apps for it though, has turned out to be a very painful experience. From time to time the tale gets so surreal and horrible I sometimes wish Franz Kafka were alive to describe it instead of me.

 

World outside the few largest markets does not exist

While it’s possible to download applications from the Windows Phone Marketplace in Slovenia and many other countries, it’s impossible for developers to publish them with their own account. You simply cannot register a developer account. We are not even talking about the possibility of accepting payments, it’s impossible to publish free applications as well. Why they would insist on such a limitation is truly baffling.

So Microsoft Slovenia is kind enough to publish all the apps from Slovenian developers under their account. While that was better than nothing, it also meant that we didn’t have the access to publishing our own app or statistics about how the app was doing. Everything could only be done through email with the Microsoft Slovenia employees. What that also meant is that any phone which we wanted to use for development purposes had to be physically taken to Ljubljana, to the local Microsoft HQ to be unlocked. Doable, but highly annoying and time-consuming.

Imagine badgering employees at another company to hurry up with the upload by email each time you need to publish a bug fix, let alone optimise the description of the app.

Impossible to move the app to another account

We kept working on Toshl Finance, got a lot of new users (with little thanks to Windows Phone), established a US corporation and got accepted into 500 Startups. Since we now had a US company we could finally get our own Windows Phone developer account, get the app there and live happily ever after, right? Not so fast, Mr. Naïve.

When making an account Microsoft’s site would not accept any of three credit cards. One credit card was Slovenian, one French and one US all issued by different banks so I’m pretty sure the problem was on their side. Luckily we were at the 500 Startups offices and were just talking to a Microsoft developer evangelist before and he helped us out so we could create the account without the credit card.

Once we got that done, we wanted to move the app from the old account owned by Slovenian Microsoft to our new one. We were building and improving the app for more than a year after all, got a considerable amount of downloads and great ratings on the Marketplace. As there wasn’t any way to do this in the web interface we contacted the support. The Slovenian Microsoft helped, as well as our helpful developer evangelist in the Silicon Valley. Result after weeks of wasted time: CANNOT BE DONE. They don’t have the “technical ability.”

Their answer was that we had to remove the app from the Marketplace and upload it all again. That meant losing all the download statistics, ratings as well as the inability of existing users to update through the Marketplace mechanism. To be fair, we have the same problem with Apple and the App Store and they’re being even greater assholes about it.

It was a tough pill to swallow, but we had to do it to actually have control over our publishing. We said: let’s do it quickly, like pulling of a band-aid. Take it off the Marketplace first, so we can keep the app name and uploading it the same day. What a mistake to make. Lesson learnt: never take off a live app until you have a replacement already up, rename later.

Arbitrary Marketplace certification ridiculous “morality” standards

Beacuse Microsoft (like Apple), manually inspects and certifies each app it takes about a week from the upload to the publishing of the app. Since the app was already present on the Marketplace for a year without a problem we assumed it should be a routine thing and the app will again be available to our users very soon. Wrong again!

It took A MONTH to get the app back on the Marketplace, during which time our users could not download the app, many of them paying users. While dealing with the outfall Microsoft and the Windows Phone certification team kept coming up with stupider and stupider reasons to decline our app.

First we needed to state the privacy policy again (even though it was already explained in the app and our Privacy Policy available on our site). Keep in mind that was all ok for an entire year before and numerous updates. Then they decided that we logged location data without permission. The tracking of the location of the expense was of course completely optional and up to the user, but it was true that it was marked improperly at one place. Again, that was fine for an entire year before then!

Then came the icing on the cake. The third rejection because our app used a Bing map (which isn’t allowed in China), but more importantly, our app was immoral and contained inappropriate material. As such it could not be published in Indonesia, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, United Arab Emirates… Keep in mind that Toshl is a personal finance app, it’s not about porn or gambling. Even after contacting their support they refused to elaborate on what was the offensive element.

We do try to put some humour into the apps. For example the Toshl monsters say funny sentences while syncing. We went through them one more time and the absolutely juiciest we could find is “I saw that expense you marked as “other toys.” Naughty.” It shows up randomly during sync and for max. 3 seconds. That was enough to get us banned in all those countries. We had no choice as they wouldn’t explain which exact thing was the violation and our loyal users have been already waiting for more than a month. We also refused to censor ourselves everywhere else due to puritanism of some Microsoft bureaucrats. So we disabled the distribution in those countries and published again. Finally, we got through.
We still had to email all our users, as they couldn’t update automatically from the Marketplace.

Incompetent publishing tools

The publishing platform on create.msdn.com is of course built with Microsoft tools. Which means forms made in Silverlight. Which means PAIN. When our Windows Phone developer sends me the .XAP file to publish the app I usually publish from my Mac. I need to switch browsers to publish the app and even then it’s a horrible experience. Why?

Google Chrome: Cannot even open the submit form, keeps loading in perpetuity.
Firefox: The same.
Safari (what I use in the end): Can open the form, but each time I hit space in one of the text fields it jumps to the bottom of the page, making it impossible to edit any text and actually seeing it.

Furthermore the page is confusing and the statistics poor. Microsoft bury Silverlight once and for all!

Low numbers user numbers

The results in new users from publishing on the Windows Phone Marketplace are also very low. Negligible compared to the the App Store or the Android Market. I suppose you could also blame this on us and our promotional skills but we did quite a few things to get Toshl Finance better numbers on the Marketplace, got reviews on a lot of the Windows Phone dedicated sites etc. Quite simply there aren’t a lot of Windows Phone users. In the Toshl Finance ecosystem there’s even a few percent more BlackBerry users and A LOT more Symbian^3 and MeeGo users than Windows Phone.

Promotional bait and switch

We were talking to a Windows Phone developer evangelist a while back about how we could get our app featured in the Marketplace and get more users that way. We do have a 5 star rating in the Marketplace and the users love the app, problem is getting exposure. Don’t believe the 5 star? Check out the app on the Marketplace.

We wanted to get the app on our account first, how quickly that went you already know. They told us that we’d have a lot better chance with more Windows Phone specific features, like live tiles and to try and apply later on. Live tiles are a great idea, we love them and they really make understanding your finances at a glance easy, so we went for it.

Talking to the Windows Phone evangelist today we found out there’s basically no way to get into the Marketplace nomination program currently and that they’re only focusing on promoting the upcoming Windows 8 apps…. Not even on the phone (for which SDK isn’t available), but on the desktop. He also mentioned we should do desktop app as well. Yeah right. After a developer relationship like this, who in their right mind would hop on another “burning platform” of theirs.

Microsoft and the Windows Phone team: Get your act together! If you think you can make your platform matter on mobile while offering such experiences to developers you are sorely mistaken.

Posted in Development, Opinions
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