Review of Toshl Personal Finance and Budgeting App

Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel, and in today’s video I will review the Toshl personal finance and budget app.  This is part of a series where I give you my thoughts on a variety of budgeting apps.

Toshl is a European app — it appears to be based in Slovenia.  It’s free version has limited the number of accounts and budget items that you can add. The pro version for two dollars a month has unlimited accounts and budget items, but does not include linked banking accounts. For five dollars per month, you can upgrade to the Medici level which allows for linked financial accounts.

Toshl is available for iOS, android, and has a Web app. It syncs across all of the platforms by pulling data from the cloud. Linking accounts was quite easy. It even asked whether I wanted to import past transactions or for importing to start today.

After having reviewed a number of these apps, I’m always interested in how the developers have chosen to set up the screens. Toshl seems to emphasize reporting.  You can see that each of these menu items on the left brings you to a report of some kind. Some of the reports are quite slick.  The hazard of this approach is that it buries some of the most frequently used functions in the app – namely adding transactions and budget items.

Rather than go through the screens the way that Toshl has them set up, I’m going to proceed with the main categories that I use to evaluate budgeting apps.  First,

Accounts

Adding and linking financial accounts is something you cannot do on the mobile app. That functionality only exists through the Web app at this point. As I said before, linking accounts was simple, as was as adding a bank account manually. It took me quite some time to figure out where to do this in the app. Again, Toshl buries some of these, what I consider to be, significant elements of a budgeting app.  Even though I did all of this yesterday, I can’t remember how I did it and it is not obvious to me even after poking around a bit.  After setting up my accounts, I went looking for how to edit the

Budget Categories

This is another thing that is not possible using their mobile app. It is only available on the web. And again, it was not easy to find. It required a web search on my part. Once I got there (which was under Expenses then this little grey button Edit Categories), it was reasonably easy to edit, add, and delete categories. The only issue was that Toshl automatically assigns a budget category to each imported transaction, so you will have to reassign those transactions to a new category.  I like to manually sort my budget categories, since I like to have easy access to those I use most frequently, but Toshl does not allow you to manually sort.  And, in fact, I couldn’t really figure out how it was sorting them. Maybe by last edited?  And addition, Toshl does not have ability to group budget categories.

Toshl does have a nifty feature called tagging. It gives you a more granular search ability apart from budget category. They are like subcategories, but are not strictly hierarchical — meaning you can use them across multiple budget categories.  You can edit, add, and delete tags in the same area that you do with categories (although this was not clear — again I had to look this up). I know I’m being sort of hard on Toshl for navigation, and I do realize that this is only really a problem until you get used to the app. OK, now that we’ve talked about accounts and budget categories, let’s talk about

Transactions

I signed up for the Medici level for five dollars a month, which allows me to link my credit card and bank accounts. For this reason, I will concentrate on the ease of categorizing transactions, rather than entering them. So, particularly on the website, I found this process a bit laborious. It took 4 to 5 clicks to change or update a budget category. This was the same for the app, but because it has a touchscreen, it felt easier. The mobile app also presents the categories all on one screen, where the website requires you to sometimes scroll over since there are only two lines allotted for the budget categories.  Really, I would prefer that all of the budget categories fit onto the screen, since this is the action you do most frequently when budgeting. Toshl does automatically categorize transactions for you, but it does not notify you that you need to approve them, so you have to go back through all of your transactions to search for new ones that may need to have the category altered. I find this annoying. I much prefer apps that have an inbox or holding space for approving imported transactions. I also noticed that Toshl does not allow you to add a memo. I like tagging as a concept, but I would much prefer a memo line.  This might actually be a dealbreaker for me. Finally, Toshl does allow you to split transactions and it does the calculations for you. This is just my preference, but Toshl has a lot of white space —this is very apparent when splitting transactions since you have to scroll down and down and down to add additional splits.   I tend to like apps that have a more compact presentation, so that I don’t have to scroll as much.  Next, let’s look at

Budget View

Toshl is a more of a traditional budget system (like Mint) where they are simply reporting on your actual spending versus your budgeted plan. In envelope systems, you need to be able to allocate actual money to each of the budget items, but in traditional systems you just need to identify a planned amount of spend and a timeframe (like monthly, quarterly, or annually). Toshl makes it reasonably easy to set up a budgeted amount for each category. It gives some limited options for how often that budget will repeat (like Monthly, Daily, etc.)  And it allows you to choose to roll over any remaining amount to the next budget period. If you enter the budget through the website, you can also put in a budget plan as a percentage of income.

In terms of viewing, again this is only my preference, but I think there’s too much white space on the website. The budget item list is this small list on the right, while the majority of the space is given to a highlight of a particularly particular category. It doesn’t allow you to manually sort your budget item reports.  It seems to sort them from highest dollar amount to lowest.  And different intervals are sorted in together.  Meaning your monthly recurring budget items are intermixed with quarterly or annual items. I do like that you can click through and see the actual transactions that make up the spend on each category.  So, now we are onto

Reporting

As I said before, this is not just the focus for Toshl, but also where it really shines. I like both the income and expense graphs with some nice animation. There are pie charts with Toshl spent, percentage, and daily spend. The tags are shown down here below. I do find myself wishing that you could click through to the actual transactions from this page. But you can change the date range and which accounts are shown. The monthly overview gives you a nice visual on how much you have already spent this much and how much you have left. Generally, I don’t find this kind of information as useful since it doesn’t indicate when you have big expenditures (like rent) coming up, but it may be helpful for some. This planning section gives you cash flow and balance sheet type reports. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that the creators/developers are financial folks.

Just a couple of other things. Toshl allows you to export your data. You can filter the export by a date range and by account, but not by category. Search is available both on the mobile app and the website. They seem to have quite a few tutorials and some good documentation available on their website and YouTube channel. 

And that’s it.  Toshl may be right for you if you are report driven and prefer a traditional budgeting method.  I would love to hear what you think.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching.