As we are accepting the first limited batch of beta testers on the site, let’s take a look at how migrating your data from the previous version of Toshl will be like.
As you may have gathered from our sneak peek at 2.0 or our posts on the Toshl community forums, we will be changing how the expense data is structured in the new version.
This simply means we’ll be adding some new information to each expense, like categories, locations, reminders etc. Most of these are optional and don’t affect your existing data at all. The main change will come with tags and categories.
Here are the main things you need to know:
1. Every expense needs a category.
2. An expense can only have one category.
3. Tags are now optional.
4. You can still use as many tags as you want.
5. You can transform your existing tags to categories or leave some as tags.
The Migration
We have prepared a migration wizard to make this transition as smooth and understandable as possible. There will be a little bit of reading and clicking, but once you’re done, you will be able to use the new Toshl with all it’s new graphs, features and your existing data.
To not beat around the bush too much, let me just show you how the migration process will look like. Please keep in mind that this is a work in progress and that there are bound to be some changes before this ships in the final version.
Don’t worry, we didn’t forget Step 4. Step 4 is for sorting incomes, Step 5 for sorting expenses. Otherwise the interface is the same, so let’s just skip to Step 5 one, as it’s a bit more interesting.
The tags that you see in the red buttons on top are the ones that have been brought over from your existing Toshl data. When you’ll be migrating, your tags will of course show up there. You might also notice that some tag names in this case already match the categories below. This is only because I have been experimenting with the tag names before and have manually renamed them in advance. Your tags will show up exactly as they were.
The easiest thing is to drag a tag into one of the categories that have been pre-created below. The other way is to click on the tag and you will see all the actions you can do with this tag.
We have developed a smart system to help match the tags that you would usually use together in a category. It depends a bit on how you used Toshl so far, but likely you won’t need to drag them all one by one as we can suggest some automatic moves for you.
After you have finished sorting all the tags we’ll show you where things stand in the new interface and you’ll then be able to see your data in the glory of the new graphs, lists and with some cheeky comments, courtesy of the Toshl monsters.
The interface for editing and merging categories, tags etc. will remain available as Edit categories even after you have already migrated. You can sort out some details there and perfect your categorisation system.
If you don’t like the results of the migration at all and would like to start over to sort the expenses and tags differently, you will be able to revert the migration in Edit categories up to two weeks after you have done it. If you revert it, all your data will be returned to the state before the migration and you can go through the process again.
One of the reasons why we are posting this in advance is to get your feedback about the migration process. If there are things that are unclear or if you have additional questions, please ask us here or write to our private support. Perhaps you can help us improve the process before we release this for everyone to use.