Of all the many things I keep track of, the one thing I’ve never really tracked much is my spending habits. It isn’t that I didn’t see the value in doing so, but rather that I couldn’t find an application that I’d actually stick with.
I read a review somewhere of Toshl.com and decided to give it a try and I’m pretty much hooked. The nice thing about Toshl.com is its simplicity, as you can see below:
That’s pretty much it for Toshl on my smart phone. One screen to add an amount and a few tags, and then a viewing screen to see my spending sorted either chronologically or by tag. So I can see how much I spent on action figures over the last few months, or how much bank fees are really costing me.
Obviously there is a lot that doesn’t get captured by such a simple system. There is, for example, no way that I know of to record income or more complicated transactions. But for what I want, it works.
The app is free on a variety of platforms, and syncs data to a website. I paid the $19.95 annual subscription fee to enable search, editing directly from the website interface, and additional export options. One problem with the export options — even the for-pay version — is that Toshl exports dates in a format that U.S. versions of Excel don’t recognize (even its “Export to Excel” option has this problem), which is very annoying.
But overall, it was worth $19.95.