Exporting

Hi all,

Thanks to the amazing feedback we’ve been gathering on this forum and the conversations on the in-app chat (congrats mainly to @leah @natasha and @tristan :raised_hands:) I’m completely sure that many of you are going to love this little feature we’re working on… the ability to export your data!

The bottom line is “We don’t want to lock up your data”. Your data is totally yours and we want to give you the right tools to access it and use it freely for whatever you may need (reports for accountants, integrate with other software, personal backups, etc.).

We don’t know yet how it will exactly look but probably something along the lines of these screenshots (export from “Search” and export from “Your spending”).

Please let us know how your perfect exporting tool would be, this is the most requested feature so far and we need to make it right :slightly_smiling:

Thanks!
Hugo

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Looks like a sneak peak of a new search feature too! :smiley:

New search looks awesome, but are the averages staying in search too when you scroll up? I find them incredibly useful

Also, will the new search include positive transaction amounts? I try to search for refunds but only negative transaction amounts are returned.

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This looks amazing @hugo.

I’d love a “download all items since my last export” option. My most common use-case for downloading from Natwest is “send expenses to the finance department”

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@jamesallison yes, the new search will get you everything (payments, refunds, top ups and both sent and received P2P payments).

Regarding the “scroll-up averages” we still need to figure out what we’re doing with that. It’s a tricky problem to offer totals and averages when mixing positive and negative numbers.

Now that you have the “Your spending” section, do you mind if I ask you what are you using the totals for? What kind of queries are you writing that you can’t answer from “Your spending”?

@tom that makes sense. One of the things I want to include is some kind of “recent searches” button (same way iTunes does) so we should be able to give you a handy shortcut for that.

On the horizon, of course, something IFTTT-ish as “every month, export all my expenses and send them directly to the finance department on my behalf” :slightly_smiling:

As I mentioned over in another discussion, I personally have been using this as a form of custom spend categories. I use the notes field on transactions to tag items i.e “lunch”. Then I can search for “lunch last week” to see totals and averages just for the tagged lunch items, excluding all the other eating out items.

This functionality may well be replaced in other developments you have planned though.

For example, everything that is an expense towards learning to drive I put “driving” in the notes, so then in the search I can easily see a total when I search for “driving”, even though these transactions can often span multiple categories and merchants, which Your Spending wouldn’t show.

Would be nice if you could export to json

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Won’t be needing this then

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Looks good, just a minor issue - on the first mockup, the location of the export icon is a bit strange … top left is usually the place for a ‘back’ button and the hardest to reach by thumb. Could the export button float towards the bottom of the screen?

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Yes, there’s potentially a bit of friction with that button, thanks a lot for spotting it :slightly_smiling:

The thing is that we want to keep the native search pattern (Cancel on right, no back) and, at least for now, we don’t want to add actions as rows (even though we’ll need to do it as we grow on features) and we’ll have more share/export buttons on the NavBar of different screens, so it helps with consistency.

In any case, we’ll try it with users and iterate as we always do, tbh I can imagine it changing before we actually get to ship it :ship: I hope we can solve that friction by then :wink:

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I would love to see an option to export a PDF directly to Dropbox, as I mentioned here.

If there is a PDF export it would be really helpful to have it digitally signed.

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Looks amazing - is JSON an option?

@muyiwa not at this point… I guess if you want JSON you could connect straight from the API, right?

Maybe I’m missing something here though, are there many iPhone apps that can take a JSON as input? Thanks!

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Yeah that’s what I do now (use the API to export JSON)

Export in the latest version of the app is a nice addition. Would be good to include the is_load field, easier for us excel geeks then :slight_smile:

Just exported my spending data to excel - such a great feature :wink: would there be any use / problem of automatically using the colours you have used for the categories in the download i.e. purple for holiday transaction , red for eating out etc etc - rather than a whole list in black print so that you could imeadiately pick out /locate which category you are spending in on the spreadsheet ? - I did export all my expenses since January to get an indication of what I was spending on what and it was a long long list of black typeface .

One other thing I am having problems with - although this might be because Im a technophobe - once Ive downloaded my csv version to my spreadsheet , used the info with calculating cells , altering colours etc I try and save it and it then returns everything to the original downloaded figures and layout - grrrrr - Ive got over this by copying and pasting to another spreadsheet which then saves all my changes - maybe Im being thick :wink: ?

You’re probably saving the file again as a CSV which doesn’t support any formatting or anything. The best thing to do is to save as and make sure the file type is set to Excel this will keep it with formatting. Sorry I’m on my phone else I’d send a screenshot!

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