FAQ: Data
- On the old device, open the app, from the menu select Settings, and then select Backup.
- This will create a ZIP archive, that you need to copy to the new device:
- The easiest way to transfer the backup is to activate "Share exports and backups", before creating the backup, then you can select between any communication app, that you also use on the new device (Email, Signal, WhatsApp, etc.)
- Alternatively, select "Files" (the last entry in "Export / Backup" section), then select the last backup, and then click on Share.
- On the new device, open the app. The Restore functionality can be called
- either from the onboarding screen (on the third page with title "Let us set up your first account", in the bottom left corner, there is an icon representing a user, that opens a menu with entry "Restore local backup file").
- or, after having finished onboarding, from the menu select Settings, then select Restore (ZIP).
- Select the file, and confirm.
How do I delete app data? After uninstalling and re-installing the app, data seems automatically restored?
This happens, when you have opted into Google's backup of app data while you configured your device. In order to delete the data that My Expenses holds, you need to open the Application Manager from the System Settings, then select My Expenses, then Storage, then Clear Storage. If you only want to delete one or a few accounts in My Expenses, you can do so from the account list by long tapping on an account, and select Delete from the popup menu.
With My Expenses, your data is in your control, thus it is not stored on any servers. This also means that it is your responsibility to create manual backups or configure automatic backups.
On the one hand, if the app is installed from Play Store, you can opt in to Google's feature of backing up app data. My Expenses does cooperate with this feature. But neither the app, nor you have any control on the schedule, and there is no obvious way of checking that the backup works correctly.
On the other hand, My Expenses has its own auto-backup mechanism, which can store the backup files on a cloud storage. First you need to add a synchronization backend (You do not need to select any of your accounts for synchronization). Then on the screen where you activate auto-backup, you select the synchronization backend. The following video illustrates the setup: https://www.facebook.com/MyExpenses/videos/1884000248528111/
If you activate the option "Share exports and backups", you have the following options for setting "Upload URL":
- If it is empty, each time you create an export or backup, the system will prompt you to select an app which will receive the file.
- A mailto link (e.g. "mailto:john@my.example.com) will create a message in your email client with the given recipient, and the file as an attachment.
- An ftp link (e.g. "ftp://login:password@my.example.org:port/my/directory/") will be handled by SendWithFTP if installed on the device.
- Since version 3.3.9, you can also use an http(s) URL representing a resource which allows PUT requests, for example a WebDAV collection URL. Username and password can also be provided as part of the URL as shown in the ftp URL example.
Currently (since version 3.5.0) encryption can only be activated during first run of the app. On the second screen of the Onboarding Wizard, there is a menu labeled "Experimental" with a "Encrypt database" item. If you want to make use of this feature with existing data, you must first create a backup, and reinstall the app. If you activate Encryption on the second screen, and then on the third screen select the backup archive to restore, it will be imported into an encrypted database. The passphrase is managed via Android's KeyStore and can not be extracted from the device. Consequently data will not be backed up via Androids backup service. When you create a backup from the app's settings, the database is decrypted. You can encrypt the backup archive by setting a "Passphrase for backups".
Starting with version 3.6.5, you can attach multiple documents to transactions (by default images and PDF files, additional MIME types can be configured in the Advanced section of the Settings).
When you copy attachments, they will still be available if the original is deleted, but it will take up more space on the device's storage. Linking attachments has two drawbacks:
- If the original is moved or deleted, you end up with a broken link.
- Android has a limit on the number of permissions that an app can hold on content from other apps. This limit is 512 since Android 11, and only 128 prior to it. So if you make heavy use of this feature, you might have to switch to copying attachments.
As of version 3.6.7, categories can be flagged as expense and/or income categories, which gives four types, dependent on the flags set:
| Expense Flag | Income Flag | |
|---|---|---|
| expense category | ✓ | |
| income category | ✓ | |
| neutral category | ✓ | ✓ |
| transfer category |
The point of these types is to determine the effect of a transaction on the sums of expenses, income and transfers. The following table illustrates how transactions with positive and negative amounts behave, when they are assigned to these different types:
| expense category | income category | neutral category | neutral category (aggregate) | transfer category | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| + | -expense | +income | +income | +income/-expense | +transfer |
| - | +expense | -income | +expense | -income/+expense | -transfer |
The idea is to reflect following use cases:
- You receive a refund for a purchase you had registered previously. You assign the refund to an expense category, and it will not increase the sum of income, but decrease the sum of expenses.
- You want a tax payment not be seen as an expense, but as a reduction of your income: You assign it to an income category.
- You transfer money between two accounts, where only one is managed by My Expenses: You assign it to a transfer category.
The aggregate option was (re)introduced in version 3.6.8. It is set globally on the Distribution screen, or individually for each budget. It allows to treat neutral categories as they had been treated prior to version 3.6.7.
How are transactions that are not mapped to a category, accounted for? In the Settings (Data section) there is an option allowing you to decide if the "Unmapped" category is considered as neutral (as in versions prior to 3.6.7, and by default), or represents transfers.
Imagine you have the following split transaction:
It represents a use case, where you hand-in a 200$ voucher at a shop, buy groceries for 100$. As a result you receive 100$ in cash. In the group header of the transaction list, this is correctly identified as 200$ income, 100$ expenses:
Prior to version 3.6.7, the totals in the account list behaved differently, they only took the whole split transaction into account, which resulted in an income of 100$:
This has been fixed in version 3.6.7. Now both contexts give the same information:
On the "Parties / Debts" screen, if you merge duplicate parties, you can decide to either delete the duplicates or group them together.
The idea of the second option is motivated by the following use case: Imagine that you import transaction data from an external source (e.g FinTS, CSV, etc.), and various spellings appear in this data for one and the same party, or the same party appears with different bank details. If you deleted these variations during a merge, they would be recreated each time, you import data from the same source. Grouping duplicates together allows you to keep all variants and bank details linked to one main entry.