OrangeSoftware.Ru Software for Android

WebserviceX.Net which Financisto uses by default to download exchange rates is having difficulties lately, so in 1.6.4 I’ve integrated 2 more providers:

Flowzr – Thanks to Emmanuel Florent, based on Yahoo Finance API. Pick it up in the preferences, does not need any additional configuration.

Open Exchange Rates – offers free and paid service. To use it in Financisto you would need to register a free personal account and specify your App ID in the preferences.

This individual ID gives 1000 requests per month for no cost.

In the future, integration with Open Exchange Rates would allow users with Pro accounts to download historical rates as well.

1.6.4 also adds an option to download all current exchanges rates for all configured currencies at once. You can access it by using Menu button from Exchange Rates screen.

I’ve got a few complains that running balance is getting out of sync is some (yet unknown) cases. While I’m still investigating the root cause, Financisto 1.6.1 introduces a semi-automatic way to fix it. On startup Financisto will compare current cunning balance and total amount for every account. And if they got out of sync, then a warning will appear on the screen.

To re-calculate the running balances please pick Menu -> More -> Integrity fix.

A few new features in 1.5.8:

Detailed totals by currency and exchange rate errors

Seems like the last update caused a lot of confusion related to how totals get calculated in Home currency. From 1.5.8 Financisto is more user-friendly and will tell if there is something wrong with exchange rates setup which can stop it from calculating correct total.

If everything is fine, then detailed total screen will show totals for every currency and overall total in Home currency.

Pie charts

Every report screen now includes Pie Chart button which shows, well, a pie chart for this report. This is experimental (does not work in Android 1.5 for example) and your constructive criticism is most welcome.

Other changes

Exported .csv and .qif files can now be automatically uploaded to Dropbox.

1.5.7 has been released. New features and bug-fixes include:

• New hierarchical category selector
• New 3×1 and 4×1 widgets with embedded “New transaction” and “New transfer” buttons
• Slovak translation
• Fix total calculation in Blotter/Reports

New category selector

Makes it easier to pick categories if you have a long list or deep hierarchy. Give it a try, if you don’t like it, turn it off in the Preferences.

• The first one turns it on/off
• Confirm automatically – if you select a leaf category (which does not have any child categories) then the selector closes automatically with the selected category
• Income/Expense – allows to group income/expense categories together

New widgets

I’ve got quite a few complains that “New transaction” and “New transfer” shortcuts are not working properly with some custom launchers. So here are 2 new widgets 3×1 and 4×1 with these shortcuts embedded

Home currency and exchange rates

Home currency is now used to calculate totals in accounts list, blotter and reports. To convert from one currency to another Financisto uses list of exchange rates. You can add any rate on any date manually or download current rate from on-line provider.

Here how it works. Go to Menu -> Entities -> Exchange rates:

Initially the list is empty, you can add a rate by selecting “from” and “to” currency and taping on + button. To edit a rate just tap on it, to delete – long tap and tap Delete from popup menu.

The screen to add a rate is straightforward. You can change the date and the conversion rate value manually. The button on the left of calculator downloads the rate for specified currencies from Internet. Currently it can only get the rate for the current date, ignoring any other selected date.

When calculating total amount, conversion rate is looked up from the list according to the transaction date. For example:

Date  | USD -> EUR | Amount USD | Converted amount EUR
1 Mar |    1.3324  |    10$     |   10*1.3324 = 13.32
2 Mar |   No rate  |    20$     |   20*1.3324 = 26.65
3 Mar |    1.3415  |    10$     |   10*1.3415 = 13.41

Note that for 2nd of March the conversion rate from the previous day is used to calculate the amount. This means that if you already have some transactions, say, one or two years old, then you would need to add an exchange rate which has the date matching the date of the very first transaction. Otherwise the amounts will be converted 1 to 1 into Home currency. You can get historical rates on xe.com.

Dropbox integration

To get it working you will have to authorize Financisto first. It’s easier to do if you have official Dropbox app installed. Financisto will not have full access to all your Dropbox, only to /financisto folder. There are a couple of options available in Menu -> Preferences -> Dropbox:

• Authorize – tap to enable integration with Dropbox
• Unlink – de-authorize Financisto to prevent it from accessing Dropbox
• Upload Backups – this option allows to automatically upload backup file to Dropbox when you do Database Backup
• Upload Auto-backups – if you have auto-backups enabled, the files will be uploaded to Dropbox automatically

New release 1.5.4 available in Android Market. A couple of new options available in the Preferences:

Daily automatic backup

It is disabled by default – you would need to turn it on. And set the backup time.

 Backup Folder

Can now be configured to point to any other directory on SD card. This can be useful to have an automatic backup to Dropbox or any other cloud service which supports syncing files from a specific folder.

Send Backup To..

Can be used to send the backup file to any other app supported by the standard Android intent. For instance, both Dropbox and Google Docs official apps support it. You can also use it so send the file attached by email. Please note that the file is not encrypted, so please don’t put it on any public place.

There are also a few UI improvements including quick action menus in the Accounts and Blotter screens. If you don’t like them you can turn them off in the Preferences.

A note to developers who make integrations with Financisto – the backup file is now gzipped by default. You would have to support both old and new formats.

I’m happy to announce Financisto 1.5.3 update. The main functionality:

The long expected QIF and CSV import

QIF is a cumbersome format but it’s very popular in personal finance software and supporting it was vital for Financisto users (second popular request on our Uservoice). QIF import is still experimental and only supports full import – meaning that all current data will be erased the same way as in Database Restore. Supporting partial import is my next todo item.

CSV import is experimental as well Here are the current limitations: only partial import supported into single account, all entities should already be present in the database (categories, project, locations). We’ll work on fixing these limitations in the future releases. It is important to have correct file format for CSV import – it should be in UTF-8 and has the header line like in this example.

To select QIF or CSV file for import you would need a file explorer installed on your phone. OI File manager is a decent open-source app you can use.

Auto-fill category when selecting a payee

Category is now associated with Payee field. When you select a payee, the Category field will be auto-completed with the last used category for this payee.

Fixed the bug with case-sensitive payee search

It was a problem for non-English languages that the search for payee was case-sensitive. There are still some limitations, but at least it will ignore the first letter, so search for “пар” will return both “парковка” и “Парковка”.

Split transactions have been introduced in Financisto 1.5.0. In a split transaction you can divide up the transaction amount into multiple categories or transfer a part of it into a separate account.

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Unfortunately had to remove Missed Reminder from the Market, sorry. This app was created quite some time ago for G1 running 1.5 and has not been updated since to work with any recent Android version. The fact that it was working just fine for some people is a lucky coincidence :) With so many devices and Android versions (“oh noes, not teh fragmentation sh*t again!”) it was not realistic to keep it stable and working for everyone. And I’ve got too many complains after the latest gmail update which broke gmail notifications again.

A couple of alternatives:

1. Missed Reminder is an open-source project - you can grab the sources, make it work and release under your own name.
2. Give Missed Call a try. It was created ever before Missed Reminder and the developers have put a lot of efforts to keep it up to date.