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.

• 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.

Categories in the list are shown in the same order as they organized in Entities -> Categories. There are a few configuration options available for the selector in the “New transaction screen” section:

• 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 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.

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

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.

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”.

To start splitting a transaction you can either tap on the blue icon or select [Split...] category manually:

In the Amount field specify the total amount of the transaction:

New Unsplit amount field shows the amount yet to be splitted. You have to allocate the full amount to be able to save the transaction. Allocate specific amount to a category by adding a new split to the transaction. You can add a split by tapping on the unsplit amount field itself and then tapping on either Transaction or Transfer in the quick action menu or by tapping on the icons on the right side of the field:

Additional items in the quick action menu allow to automatically allocate the unsplit amount by the following rules:

• Amount – subtracts the unsplit amount from the total amount. Useful when you edit a split and then want to correct the total amount to be sum of all splits
• Evenly –  distributes the unsplit amount among splits evenly
• Last – adds the unsplit amount to the last split. The last two are useful when you change the transaction total amount and want to reflect it on the existing splits

In the new split screen you can select a category for the split, change the amount and add a note. When you change the amount for the split, the unsplit amount will be updated to show the remaining amount.

Keep adding splits until you’ve got the full amount allocated, then tap on Save. A split transaction is marked by special icon in the Blotter. You can see the individual splits in the Transaction Info dialog.

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.

Kudos to GreenDroid library which allowed me to make this UI transformation very fast and easy.

• Proper currency list. I’ve seen quite a few comments on the Market like “WTF, where is my currency?”. This should solve this annoyance – user will now be able to pick up any from the list of 198 predefined currencies.
• Automatic lock. There was a security concern – if you leave Financisto using Back button and then come back, then it did not ask you for the PIN again. Lock option adds a timeout after which the application will lock itself and ask for the PIN. Have to mark it as “experimental” because current implementation might be little rough on the edges.
• Two options added to the QIF export – amount format and date format. This should solve issues like a space in the amount or incorrect day and month in the date.
• Launcher icons for “New transaction” and “New transfer” have been improved for hi-res.

Enjoy! Next big step is getting Splits ready for 1.5.0 release.