7 Minute Guide
Activity
What is an Activity? For Spendigo, an Activity is anything with a start and an end — a vacation, a day trip, a weekend at a festival, a two month trek across a continent, or just a week off work with a couple of days out, and so on.
Your spending often starts before you start your activity (booking travel and accommodation, buying things you will need), and occasionally continues after your activity as well (left over or late bills). Keep a track of all of these and you will get the true picture.
Start an Activity in the Activity List, by tapping New Activity and you are straight in. You can tap on the title Untitled to change it, add notes and set when you leave home (or start) and when you return home (or finish). You can set or change these at any time.
Spend…
Add a Spend by picking a category and entering an amount — that’s it, you’re done.
In the Spend… panel you see icons for six base categories. Tap any icon and it will open to show sub-categories. Tap the one you want and the spend editor will appear, or tap the dog ear to collapse them. Find out more in Categories.
Later, after you have added a few spends, an extra row with the spend categories you use most often will appear above.
Edit a Spend When you first add a spend by picking a category, all you need to do is add an amount, and then tap the tick button to accept. (Or you can tap the tick-plus button to accept this spend and immediately add another spend). Actually, you can even skip the amount and set it later.
You can change a spend whenever you like and however many times you like, and Spendigo will recalculate accordingly. You don’t even have to fill in all the details straight away — if things are busy you can add a spend, tap tick and come back to it later.
Spendigo suggests the most important bits of information to enter by showing big yellow backgrounds — usually just amount and description — but you can also change the date, currency and category, and if its important to you, whether you paid using cash or card (see Keeping track of cash).
To enter other fields while editing, use the left and right arrow buttons above the keypad / keyboard / date picker / category picker, or when viewing, tap the fields or their icons (white on blue). As a shortcut while editing, you can also tap on amount to get currency, and vice versa.
Go…
Where Am I? Spendigo keeps an eye on the local time to know where you are.
Whenever Spendigo learns that you have entered a different time zone it checks the country, and hence currency, and of course the time offset for the new zone. If any of these have changed, then Spendigo displays a Country/Time Change with useful extra information, such as the time and currency relative to home and where you were previously.
Spendigo is always the last to know. So, when it does find out, it asks you when you actually started using the new local time, and gives you the chance to correct it. You can also change it later if you missed it the first time — just tap on the Country/Time Change name where you see it inline with your spends.
FAQ: But I’m not in this country?
We Were Here — its easy to forget later where you were at a particular time, so Spendigo lets you add simple Place Notes.
Tap Visit Place in the Go… panel, name the place and adjust the time if you need. Spendigo shows a place note inline with your spends at the correct order in time. You can tap on it at any time to adjust it.
What’s in a Day?
Below the header panel for your Activity, you see your spends, place notes and country/time changes in time order, and grouped by day. The first full day after you leave home is Day 1. The days before this are grouped together under Before Leaving Home, and the days after you return home are grouped under After Returning Home. Spendigo will split a day when you arrive somewhere with a new currency.
Initially you see your spends summarised in a paragraph. You can expand this paragraph into a columnar list by tapping on the icon at its end. This shows you totals, and relates the spending to your home currency when needed. The same icon toggles to allow you to collapse the list again.
Tap on any spend, place note or country/time change to see and edit its full details.
You can also tap on the heading above the spends to completely collapse the day and hide the spends, in case you don’t want to be reminded. Tap again to reveal. Yesterday’s spends will automatically hide if left untouched.
Results
When you have completed your activity, that is, it is now after the date you entered for your return home or finish time, a results footer shows at the bottom of the activity view. Tap the Results button in the footer to go to the Results View.
The Results View displays all your spending graphically in three forms:
- The Overview gives the total for the holiday and breaks it down into before during and after the holiday.
- The By Country view breaks down the spending by country visited as well as before and after, and also shows amounts in both local and your home currency. If you used both cash and card during your activity, this view shows the breakdown between the two.
- The By Day view shows the spending further broken down to daily amounts.
Export
At any time you can export your spending in CSV format, which can be imported by spreadsheet applications. This includes amounts in original and equivalent home currency, a breakdown by category, and category totals including by group. (CSV stands for Comma Separated Values.)
Tap on the activity name or note or its dates, and the activity details will be shown. Above this is an export button (with an arrow emerging from a box). Tap the export button to start an email with your spending as an attachment.
Activity List
The Activity List shows you all your activities. Swipe left on activity to delete it. If its a big activity, Spendigo will check that you are sure before deleting it.
Settings
The Settings are accessible from the title bar of the Activity List. You can set:
- Looks
Choose a background for your Activity. Choose from one of the great pictures Spendigo gives you, or pick one of your own photos or even take a picture, or select None if you are happier without a background.
You can preview your choice to select the area to use (pinch and slide) and adjust the lightness so that you can still see the foreground easily.
If you choose to have a background, then the Activity List will also show a standard background picture.
- Totals
Decide whether Spendigo should show you the total you spend each day, and whether it should show you the total you have spent so far on your activity.
• Warning: Showing your running totals could spoil your relaxation and enjoyment. 😉 •
You will get to see the overall totals in the Results at the end of the activity.
- Your Home Details
Set your home country, and if there is a choice, your home currency and home time zone. Spendigo relates all your foreign travel and spending to your home details.
If you changed your home details, your activities will be updated when you open them if the return home / finish date is still in the future.
Support
The Support screen is accessible from the title bar of the Activity List. It provides Help, Talk and Information.
The Help section offers you this Guide that you are reading now, an overview of the Categories, and a selection of Answers and Tips.
The Talk section allows you to contact us and your friends. You can use email, Twitter or Facebook.
Please let us know what you think!
- What would you most like to see added to Spendigo?
- What doesn’t come up to scratch?and if we’re lucky…
- What do you really like?
Complaints make us happy, because we can address them. Indifference makes us sad, because we don’t know what we did wrong. You influence what we do next.
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