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.

Some technical details on that. The old backup mechanism was uploading backup file in text format to Google Docs and eventually there is 512kb limit for such kind of files – that’s why the backup stopped working after some time when the database became big enough to generate backup bigger that the limit.  And until recently is was not allowed to upload any arbitrary files to Google Docs for standard accounts (it was only enabled for premium accounts). In May Google announced that they’re enabling this feature for all accounts, but developers have to use different API for that. To facilitate backups on Google Docs we’re using non-official android-gdocs-api and this feature was not implemented in the library. So it took some time to investigate how it should work and make the patch for the library. As the format was going to be incompatible with old backup files anyway, it was only logical to make them smaller as well. So now they get gzipped before uploading to Google Docs, which makes the backup file much smaller.

So after updating to 1.4.8 please do a fresh backup on Google Docs. There might be some glitches from time to time, just repeat the attempt and it should work.

Thanks for being patient and supportive on that issue.

About 2.5k people are still using Android 1.5 (out of ~48k total installs) which is about 5.2%. Keeping backward compatibility with this version of Android is not really convenient but was a necessary choice. However I plan to gradually stop supporting 1.x devices in the next couple of releases. It should help to move Financisto forward. Please let me know if you have any serious concerns about that.

market://search?q=pname:ru.orangesoftware.financisto.support