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Toshl Takes the Pain Out of Expense Tracking

pamelapoole — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 22:00:51 +0000

I don’t know about you, but I often get to the end of the day and wonder just where the 40 bucks I had in my wallet disappeared to. And whenever I’ve tried to save receipts for a month to get an idea of what I’m spending my money on, they usually ended up in the recycling because it was too much of a project to go through them all. But at LeWeb, I came across Toshl, a very appealing mobile expense-tracking app that I might actually use because it’s so wonderfully simple (and free).

In Toshl, there are only two things to input to record an expense: an amount and a tag(s). The only way to enter your expenses is through your phone, which makes sense to me. Otherwise I’d have receipts stacking up next to my computer, and you know how that would end. You can sync your data with the website manually from your phone, or set it to sync automatically over Wi-Fi or other connection. And if you want to keep track of the cash leaking out of someone else’s wallet too, you can. Toshl lets you sync multiple phones, and you can create a tag for your name and theirs to see who’s spending what.

Essentially, the Toshl website is only used for viewing and exporting data. You can’t even create an account through the website; you have to do it from your phone. Your expenditures can be displayed by time period or tags in two different graph formats. With the free account, you can export your data in .csv format. With the Pro version ($19.95 a year), you have a few more options, including exporting to Excel, PDF and Google Docs.

There are a number of other expense tracking apps out there, but most have many more features than I need or have the patience to learn how to use: Mobile app ProOnGo (not free) also syncs with a website, has a receipt reader and exports to QuickBooks. Expensify (free) also exports to QuickBooks and can be used for tracking time and mileage. PageOnce (free) allows for globally tracking of all of your expenses and bills, and offers alerts and notifications. EasyMoney (Android-only, not free)can also be used for tracking both expenses and bills, and allows you to enter more specific info for each transaction. Expenditure (iPhone only, not free) has a nice interface, but it doesn’t offer syncing or graphs. SplashMoney (not free) can connect to your bank account, and also has a desktop version.

Toshl is available for iPhone, Android, Nokia Maemo and Symbian. The company plans to add more features gradually, but I hope they don’t abandon their less-is-more approach.

What do you use to track your spending?

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