Toshl Finance Blog

Travel with Toshl Finance – keep on top of your expenses in different currencies

Posted on February 29, 2012

Traveling abroad is awesome. Broadens your horizons, gets you out if your normal routine and into new experiences. While a small nuisance in comparison to the benefits, tracking your money-flow can be much more difficult. The currency is different, so keeping track of how much you spend is more difficult because you have to do all these extra calculations in your mind. Here’s where Toshl Finance really shines.

Foreign currencies in Toshl Finance

When you’re adding an expense, simply tap the currency button next to the numeric keyboard. You’ll get a list of currencies you can switch to. For those that are on the list we’ll also suggest the daily exchange rate for that currency. If you want to add your own exchange rate, you’re welcome to do so.

Select the foreign currency on the numeric keyboard

Get an exchange rate automatically

Toshl will remember the currency you chose until the next time you change it. That way you can easily enter all your expenses as you spend them in the foreign currency. Tap the added expense to see the details and you’ll see it in calculated in your home currency too.

Quick tip: with this you can also use Toshl as a quick currency calculator if you like.

The daily sums add up in your main currency

See the valute in your main currency on expense detail See the value in your main currency on expense detail

All the daily sums and graphs use the numbers in your home currency so your figures always add up properly, no matter where you’ve been.

All your foreign expenses are converted and fit right in the graphs

How are the currency exchange rates updated?

The currency list is refreshed with the new exchange rates for the day each time you sync. Of course you can also add any of the currencies which isn’t on the list, by choosing “Custom currency” from the list. In that case you’ll need to know the exchange rate yourself.

Here’s the list of 34 currencies that Toshl knows the daily exchange rates for. We’d like to support the rest too, but the European Central Banks provides the rates for those currencies, the rest have to be added manually. Getting the rates from different sources would be a bit too complicated for the time being.

Euro
US dollar
Japanese yen
Bulgarian lev
Czech koruna
Danish krone
Pound sterling
Hungarian forint
Lithuanian litas
Latvian lats
Polish zloty
New Romanian leu
Swedish krona
Swiss franc
Norwegian krone
Croatian kuna
Russian rouble
Turkish lira
Australian dollar
Brasilian real
Canadian dollar
Chinese yuan renminbi
Hong Kong dollar
Indonesian rupiah
Israeli shekel
Indian rupee
South Korean won
Mexican peso
Malaysian ringgit
New Zealand dollar
Philippine peso
Singapore dollar
Thai baht
South African rand

We hope Toshl will come handy wherever you travel to. Since it’s already being used in all kinds of places we have no doubt that the support for different currencies comes in handy many times. If you have some questions or ideas about currencies, we’d love to hear from you, international men and women of mystery. ;)

Posted in Tips & Tricks, Travel, Tutorials

Toshl in Start-up Now guide

Posted on January 31, 2012

We had an awesome ride at Seedcamp New York, summer 2011. Learned a lot, met awesome individuals and teams, worked a lot as well. And a small chunk of what we learned has just been published in Start-up Now guide.

Seedcamp is an early stage startup program with long history of activity and success. Basically they are there to help great teams with awesome ideas to get even greater and better at what they do.
And since they are good guys (and gals, of course), they share this profound experience and knowledge everywhere they go, using all means possible. As a result of that, they just published a quick overview of shared experiences across many applicants of Seedcamp, including Toshl, in a slideshare eBook.

A must read for all future-to-be seedcamp companies and startups in general.
Go get it now!

Startup Now: A Guide from the Seedcamp 2011 participants

View more presentations from cubesocial

Posted in Announcements, News coverage

Gamification of personal finance, there’s a better way to do it

Posted on January 30, 2012

There’s a lot of talk of gamification in personal finance, but it shouldn’t be about piling on extra layers of unwanted information. It should help us understand existing information better and understand the way our habits need to change. It should keep the user’s best interest in mind. Not the marketer’s.

I was just reading an article by Reuters on the gamification of finance in the United States. It describes some approaches various financial startups are taking to gamify personal finance. It says that “gamification” is an inelegant term for what they’re doing, but I would go further than that. The term isn’t inelegant, but the type of gamification they have in mind is. They describe systems of badges, contests, prizes, competitions etc. a lot of excessive cognitive add-ons to the finances you should be taking care of.

Finance should be more fun, even gamified, and that’s what we’re striving to build with Toshl. But forcing in all the laziest approaches to gamification such as those described above is not the solution. Personal finance needs to be simple to be fun and that also means unburdened by excessive information. When gamification is used in personal finance it should be used to convey more information about the user’s finances and encourage positive financial habits. There are so many ways to convey information in games that makes it simpler to understand, internalize and at the same time, not make it feel like a chore, but something playful and fun. Going for prizes, sweepstakes, coupons most of the time only introduces more cognitive overload, confuses and makes us change our spending patterns in ways that stray from the optimal. An effective personal finance manager should help you realize your true financial needs, not create new ones with false senses of economies.

With Toshl we want to build a fun and simple way to manage your finances. That means that when we decide to gamify the experience it will be truly informative and help you understand the way your personal finances work and change. Most importantly it needs to be possible to opt-out of the gamified portions of the app. A lot of people simply need a simple, yet powerful tool to keep track of and plan their finances. Simply being made aware of where our money is going changes our habits and patterns of spending. Some people want a more playful experience and an easy way to change their spending patterns even more on top of that. That can be truly great and incredibly helpful, but it shouldn’t be forced on anyone and the habit-changing goals of the gamification layer should be clear. Nobody wants FarmVille-type emotional extortion when it comes to a thing as important as managing personal finances.
Gamified finance can be a great learning tool, but it needs to be fun and it needs to be oriented to the long term with the user’s best interest in mind.

We have a lot of ideas on how to make this experience great and help people change their financial behavioral patterns for the better, but in a way that they understand exactly what’s going on. The gamification layer needs to be as informative as playful, otherwise we would be missing the mark. We’re looking forward to all the things we can bring to the table, but first we need to take care of a lot of more basic building blocks to make Toshl a truly effective system to track personal finances. We love the feedback that we’re getting from you, the Toshl community. It helps us to focus and be in touch with people’s needs when it comes to personal finance. Keep it coming! We’d love to hear what you have to say on the topic of gamification in personal finance.

Written by Matic Bitenc

Posted in Opinions

Funky Toshl monster desktop images

Posted on January 28, 2012

Winter is very much in-vogue in much of the Northern hemisphere. It’s so popular in fact that we didn’t want to miss this awesome trend. All the kids are crazy about it! Your phone should get up to speed as well. That’s why we’ve made some illustrations with Toshl monsters doing some funky business to liven up your phone’s background. Perhaps they’ll help you remember to keep your finances in shape. Otherwise no lollipops for you, comrade!

Toshl monsters doing funky business

Toshl monsters don’t like to discriminate between mobile platforms, except for BlackBerries. It’s a long story involving snow-white unicorns, berry juice and unicorn prom night. Bygones. So we’ve made the wallpapers in different sizes for Androids, iPhones, Nokia Symbian^3 phones, Nokia MeeGo and Windows Phone. Go fetch them, while the snow lasts!

Dekstop image for Android 240×320
Dekstop image for Android 320×480
Dekstop image for Android 480×800
Dekstop image for iPhone
Dekstop image for Nokia N9 (MeeGo)
Dekstop image for Nokia Symbian
Dekstop image for Windows Phone

Posted in Goodies

Map of Toshl App Syncs Around the World in Real Time

Posted on January 3, 2012

We’ve been looking around our analytics and we been more and more surprised by the diverse locations ToshL users are coming from. They can be found around the world, from Kamchatka (Russia) to Harare (Zimbabwe), they’re almost everywhere. While the statistics looked interesting, they just didn’t have the right "oomph" to get us salivating. :) So we decided to make something a bit cooler to help us salivate.

Right around that random point on Earth’s orbit we call New Year’s, things were set in motion. Dr. Hills meditated, Earth shook, winds blew and little furry creatures from Alpha Centauri sang Đurđevdan. All of a sudden ToshL Live was born!
ToshL Live shows all the syncs people are making from their ToshL Finance mobile apps on the world map in real time.

Check out ToshL Live!

The last 100 syncs are already on the map and the ones coming in will be shown live as they happen. If you hold your mouse pointer over a pin for a second it will also show the name of the town where the sync happened and the phone model.

Go ahead, try it for yourself. If you don’t have the ToshL app yet, you can get it here. Save your expenses to the cloud, and your location will show up on the map in a second.

Syncs tell a story
It’s fun to watch and look for patterns. Where the syncs are made obviously depends a lot on the time of day there. It’s fun to see Europe waking up in the early hours of the morning and seeing the trickle of syncs turn into a mighty streams as Europeans wake up and start spending on their coffees.

There’s also some interesting geographical differences. Compared to the surrounding countries ToshL is a lot more popular in Singapore and Malaysia. We’ve had some good reviews from Malay sites, but other than that, ToshL’s popularity there is a bit of a mystery to us. If some of our users could shed a bit of light on this, we’d appreciate it.
It’s also quite a bit more concentrated in our native Slovenia and Europe, but that we can understand and thank our compatriots for their support.

If you see a cool pattern or insight, tell us about it in the comments.

Localisation
We’re pleasantly surprised that ToshL is used as much in non-English speaking countries, even-though we haven’t translated it yet. Right now we’re working on a new version with plenty of new features, but we plan to start with our translation efforts right after. If you’re willing to help us out with the translation of ToshL to your language, please send us an email to info@toshl.com and we’ll notify you as soon as we start. Of course we’ll also throw in some ToshL goodies for your help.

Open source ToshL Live
Giving back to the community and sharing is something we like to do. We’ve decided to open source this implementation of the real time map. If you have a stream of IP’s and would like to visualize where they’re coming from, go ahead and use it. We’re using the Google Maps API and the MaxMind GeoLite base for IP locations. See the ToshL Live project on Github.

Privacy
The data we show on the map is completely anonymous and only the approximate location of the sync and phone model are shown. The location of the sync is estimated based on the location of the IP address (not GPS). We don’t reveal your personal information to anyone. For more on this, we invite you to read our privacy policy.

Posted in Goodies