Answers and Tips
Frequently Asked Questions
- Why does it say I’m in the wrong country?
- How do I see my results so far?
- How do I correct my home country in a previous activity?
- Does an activity use up much storage?
- How do I import my spends into a spreadsheet?
- What???
Tips and Tricks
- Tap and slide
- Top of the list
- If Quick Add is too quick…
- How much is that in my currency?
- Amount ↔ Currency
- Add a batch of spends
- Keeping track of cash
Why does it say I’m in the wrong country?
Spendigo gets your country from the time zone it thinks you are in, and from time-to-time this can be incorrect.
Whenever you bring Spendigo to the front, it checks what your device thinks is the current time zone. Spendigo remains unaware of any time zones you passed in or out of while it was in the background or not running.
Ideally, your device would always know exactly which time zone you are in, but it will sometimes take a while to discover after moving to a new place, and on some configurations of iPod and iPad you might occasionally have to give them a helping hand by choosing the time zone manually instead of leaving them as automatic.
You can check the chosen time zone in the iOS Settings app under Date & Time in the General section.
Important: If you have chosen the time zone manually, Spendigo will always think you are in that time zone, and will not reflect where you actually are if this is different.
How do I see my results so far?
You can see your results from the footer that appears at the bottom of your activity after you have returned home.
You can take a sneak peek by temporarily setting the return home time of your activity to just before now.
How do I correct my home country in a previous activity?
If you change your home country, currency or time zone in Settings your current and any new activities will use the new settings.
If you need to change a finished activity, open the activity, set the return home time to undecided and accept. Close the activity, then reopen it — it will now switch over to use your new home settings, and you can set the return home time to what it was originally.
Does an activity use up much storage?
No, not much at all. For most people, all the activities of one year together take up far less space than a single photo, so you can keep past activities for comparison without any worries about space.
However, if you are having a clean up, then you can save some space by removing background photos that you added yourself and no longer use.
How do I import my spends into a spreadsheet?
You can export your spending at any time, which will send it as a CSV file attached to an email.
Most spreadsheet applications will recognise the CSV file without any problem.
However, a few of them object because the file uses UTF16 character encoding — this is technical mumbo-jumbo which just ensures that characters you type are better preserved, especially non-roman characters.
If your spreadsheet application doesn’t want to recognise the CSV file, tell it to open the file anyway, by choosing to show “All file types” in your open dialog, instead of just the recognised files.
If it asks you about the file format, tell it:
- the origin is Macintosh or unix, or the line endings are LF (they all mean the same thing),
- the file is delimited (only) by commas, and
- text is quoted with this kind of double-quote character: “
What???
If something really doesn’t look right, behaves strangely, or is just confusing and the Guide, the Categories description and these answers and tips have not helped, or there is something your really wish Spendigo could do, contact us via the Support page, or if you prefer twitter, send a tweet to @Spendigo — you can also do this from the support screen in Spendigo.
Tap and slide
If you meant to tap one spend, but got a different one instead, try this: tap your finger down, slide it until you see from the highlighting that its in the right spend, then release your finger.
You can use the same trick everywhere you can tap — for spends, places, time zone changes, your activity name notes and times, day headings.
Top of the list
Did you know you can tap in the status bar (where the clock and battery level are) to quickly scroll to the top of any screen? This works in any iOS app for any screen that scrolls vertically.
If Quick Add is too quick…
The Quick Add overlay appears every time you activate the app, so that you can get straight into adding a new spend without delay.
If you find the Quick Add overlay disappears before you’ve had a chance to pick the category of spend you are interested in, just pin it down!
Tap and hold one finger down and the overlay will stay visible — then just slide to the category you want to add. Or if you decide not to add, just slide your finger out of the left, top or right of the screen.
How much is that in my currency?
Want to know how much that local currency is in your home currency when you are curious about buying something?
Just start adding a spend (pick any category, it doesn’t matter which) and then start typing the amount you are interested in. As you type, you will immediately see the equivalent in your home currency to the left of the amount your are typing.
When you have found out what you want to know, just cancel the spend by tapping the cross button at the top left.
Amount ↔ Currency
When you are editing a spend amount, you can tap on the spend amount to switch to editing the currency, and you can tap on the currency to switch back to editing the amount.
Add a batch of spends
Sometimes you are too busy to add spends at the time, or you just forget. If you need to add a number of earlier spends in one go, you can use the Done & Add button. It is the one at the top in the centre, with the plus and tick icon.
Tap the Done & Add button when you have have entered the detail of the first of your spends. This allows you to add another spend with date and time set the same as the previous spend. You can then make a small forward adjustment of the time. This is much easier than adding each spend separately and winding the time back for each.
Keeping track of cash
If you tell Spendigo what cash you withdraw, Spendigo will
- keep a track of how it gets used up,
- show how much you have left each day, and
- show what the home currency equivalents of your cash purchases are.
When you buy foreign currency at a Bureau de change, add a spend with category Cash, set the Amount and Currency to what you bought, and set the Counter Amount to what you paid. Spendigo can then tell how much the foreign currency cost you.
Likewise, when you get cash from an ATM, also enter a spend with category Cash. You can update the Counter Amount with what the withdrawal cost you once you know it (probably when you see a bank/card statement at home); in the mean time, Spendigo will make a rough guess.
Spendigo will also show you what each spend with cash cost you in your home currency. If you entered exactly how much all your cash cost, then these conversions are exact — no more confusion over what commission and charges did to those exchange rates.
When Spendigo knows you have cash, Spendigo lets you say whether each spend was paid by card or with cash. You can correct this at anytime if you forgot it earlier (which is very easy to do).
Also tell Spendigo when you pay money back in, or gain money or lose money, by adding spends with categories Deposit, Gain and Loss.
Or have an easy life and ignore the cash — its not essential.
Satisfying Structures 