QuickAdvice: Track Your Expenses With Toshl
Toshl (Free) by 3fs is a simple app designed to do just one thing: track your expenses. If you just want to keep track of how much you spend and what you’re spending your money on, you’ll want to get this multi-platform app. If you’re looking for bells and whistles such as linking to your bank account, this is not the app for you. Toshl is one of my front page apps. It’s not perfect, but it does just what I need -- it tracks my spending.
In addition to downloading the app, you will probably want to open a free account on their website. This allows you to sync your expenses so that you have them someplace other than just on your iDevice. The website also offers nice features like graphing your expenses.
So, let’s say you go grocery shopping. Tap the “+” icon and enter the total bill. Tap “Select tags” to create a tag. Once you have created a tag for “groceries”, it will always be listed so that next time you can just tap “groceries” directly, instead of “Select tags”. The default “Date” will always be “Today”, but of course you can change that with a tap if you remember an expense you forgot to enter yesterday. Tap “Description” to enter more detail: for example, the name of the specific store, or the item(s) you bought, whatever you like.
The clock icon in the top left corner is for Time Span. Your choices are “Last 30 days”, “All time”, or “Pick a month”. Choose the latter and you get a spinner with months and years; choose which you want to see. There is one minor glitch here: if you keep “Pick a month” as your default, the month will stick but the year will not -- even though it is currently 2010, it defaults back to 2009. So, whenever I open the app, it tells me I have no expenses for the current month, because the app thinks it is 2009. I have to manually change that each time, which is sort of silly. I’m hoping that they fix that bug soon.
Once you have picked the dates you want to view, you can choose to view your expenses by “Timeline” (bottom left icon) or “Tags” (bottom center). Go to the “Settings” icon on the bottom right corner to change your currency, sync now, edit tags, or choose when you want the app to sync automatically. The default setting will sync whenever you open the app.
The one major complaint I have about this app is that the syncing can be glitchy if you have more than one person syncing to a single account (a husband and wife, for example). Two iDevices cannot sync to each other, but in theory you both should be able to sync to your single account on Toshl’s website. In practice, however, it doesn’t always work smoothly. Many people manage to do it without any problems, but for whatever reason, it never seems to sync to my husband’s iPhone properly. We depend on this information to keep track of our monthly budget, so he uses the app to enter his expenses but has to use the website, not the app, to see what we’ve spent. To be fair, two-device use was never intended by the developer. Now that they realize people are indeed syncing multiple devices to a single account, they are working on making it perform that task better.
Some may complain that there is no way to enter money on the positive side, i.e., a paycheck. This doesn’t bother me -- I wasn’t looking for a full-fledged financial planner. I just wanted a simple expense tracker and Toshl fits the bill. However, the developer assures me that the much-requested budget/income support is coming in an update soon.
All in all, not bad for the grand price of free. There is a premium version for $19.95/year which adds a few features, but nothing I felt necessary for my purposes. If you want to keep track of your expenses, you must give Toshl a try.
