Three months ago I received an invitation to try and review Toshl , a mobile expense tracker developed by ThirdFrameStudios . I also received code to get? Pro account free for first year to help me test it, which saved me a modest amount of 20 euros. It is also not a secret that I know people working at 3fs and admire their work.

As influences go, that’s it. I received neither threats to pets I don’t have or contributions to a bank account I do have. Also a complete absence of nudges means that this post took longer than planned and that all opinions are mine. Too make them less ignorant I decided at start to give Toshl a proper test and use it for couple of months before passing judgment.

Toshl, as mentioned, is a tool for keeping track of expenses. You are obviously sensible enough to know why this is wise, if you are still reading this, so I won’t bother explaining. It comes as a free application for Android devices and Maemo based N900. I heard rumors of an iPhone version, but Symbian or BlackBerry owners are out of luck (for now). Using web based companion and synchronization is free too, but you have to pay for Pro account if you want to add expenses through website or need a more flexible export of your data.

I tested Nokia N900 version of Toshl and liked it. I don’t want to go into details since they quickly become boring and there is no better test than your own (remember, it’s free). I was impressed how well it handles decimal separator for me, since I sin by using both comma and point.

Entering expenses is easy and quick, especially if you have entered similar recently, since you can reuse tags just by clicking on suggested. You also see already entered expenses sorted by time or tags. There is still room for improvement (like adapting tags suggestions based on first entered), but not much to fault.

I believe Toshl’s goal is to be as simple and fun tracker of everyday expenses as possible. You can do basic add and removal of expenses, export inserted data, categorize each entry with tags and see few different reports. That’s it. There is no integration with banks, currency conversions,? or even a notion of income. Reports are basic and I am not a fan of those included.

I usually used more than one tag on each expense and had difficulty wrapping my head around graphs where same expense could be shown multiple times. I failed at judging how much impact do some expenses have overall without at least some tweaking of graphs. I am certain that Tufte would call it chartjunk, but their implementation certainly is fun to play with.

And that’s where Toshl’s main strength is. A fun way of doing something that most people find incredibly tedious. You might overgrow it one day and switch, but it will help you develop a necessary habit of recording your expenses.

Being simple and fun doesn’t mean powerless. Tags free you to your own categorization and multiple export options give you an opportunity to massage that data further in tools of your choice. It might not be as trivial as clicking on a graph is, but doing it in Excel is not much harder.

I will not continue to use it because I am that sort of person who gets off on double-entry bookkeeping . I’ve been using GnuCash for years and there is no easy way to sync data with it (probably shouldn’t be either) and few reasons to input every expense twice. I do recommend anyone who isn’t tracking yet or is not satisfied with his current approach to give Toshl a try.

And if you are happy with free version, then buy a Pro account. It costs little, gives you features as polished as rest of service and it help secure your apps future.