A better way to budget is here šŸŽÆ

I think this is the problem with having three different graphs telling you three different things. You check your target to see what your spends should be but (as you’ve noted) it doesn’t take into account (as far as we know) the upcoming bills, so you have to go and check the balance line to see what’s happening there (yet).

Would make it more usable for me too, for sure

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Bug alert! :bug:

This button has just stopped functioning for me.

When I tap it I only ever get:

It seems to think I’ve lost my connection but I’m fully online.

Anyone else suffering?

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Thank you for confirming this, I was starting to think I was the only one. I can see the trends being a good feature if you have multiple banks but since I put all my faith in Monzo and only have the one, it feels like a step backwards from budgets.

Thank you, this is a good suggestion and temporary work around. I have set up a custom category called ā€˜PotSpends’.

However, I get an irritating niggle with this method. Each time I break open a pot and do a big purchase with that money, I’ll go in and mark it as ā€˜PotSpends’ - Monzo will ask me each time if it to mark transactions going forward from this seller as ā€˜PotSpends’.

Imagine that im using the Ā£1000 from the pot I smashed open to buy parts PC across Amazon and eBay - I really don’t want these transactions from these sellers marked as ā€˜PotSpends’ going forward. It is a niggle I know, but I’m often marking things from these sellers as different categories and once it slips it marks everything going forward and becomes a Ln overhead.

I recently broke open Christmas pot, where I save up for the 11 months for everyone’s presents so that I don’t have to fork out a massive amount of extra money one month of the year. I smashed the pot but each time I made a transaction and marked it as ā€˜PotSpend’. I had about 20 transactions to mark from different sellers and nearly marked them as this going forwards, which would throw off all my other goals.

TLDR: I exclude a lot of transactions and the custom category workaround provides a lot of margin for error (for me personally)

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So I hooked everything up and really played with it over the weekend, to both evaluate whether I could use it, and to offer suggestions for the next stages.

The TL;DR is not right now. I love the concept of the burn-down chart and that is super useful. But it’s not a finished product in that you can’t set individual budgets per area and also allow for planned extraneous purchases. More detailed feedback is below

Burndown chart

Absolute beauty. :pinched_fingers: This is the best thing about target so far.

Target setting

This is where I don’t think it works all that well. Firstly, it would be really great to allow for different targets each month rather than one set for all.

Secondly, I’m not sure I agree with the logic of how it sets its target. For example, for me it’s not picking up on the bimodal distribution of my spending, which is then throwing both the suggested target and also the ā€œamount savedā€ completely out. It should note that the rolling average over a six month period is much lower, meaning when I set it to this, the amount saved is far more realistic.


Target summary

Would be really great to see what caused me to go over target. If I can see it was pink flamingo’s then that might tell me to buy less of them for my garden. If it shows as a Ferrari, then I know it was a planned purchase. Sadly, I dont have either of these

I think there’s a real potential here, but to me it’s not all that useful, for now

Loving the direction of travel and work gone into it, great stuff @avb @RoreEricaOkoh & @dylanslewis & team

Also, @RoreEricaOkoh I wonder if you could add Targets into the thread title. It’s really hard to find this amongst others and I keep searching for Targets to see stuff from a when summary was called that :eyes:

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This is tougher though, really it’s a list of everything.

If you spend Ā£500 on flamingo food on day2, that hasn’t put you over budget, but when you buy your weekly shop, you’ll be over budget. But really it’s the first purchase that caused the over spend.

You were correct in your assumption :smirk:

I’ve just been fobbed off on live chat, hardly satisfactory and I am at a loss why Monzo would put statements to contact them through live chat regarding 28 day periods if they just tell you that they will forward it to the development team :frowning:

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They say it’s to gauge interest and see if it’s worthwhile doing.

Whether they do is a different story though!

In there, though, are the seeds of some useful analysis.

If you’ve gone over by Ā£500, identifying any exceptional (i.e. one-off) spend, or spends, that adds up to that value would be useful, whenever it happened in that period.

Similarly, if it’s a general thing, then knowing the spend by category breakdown and seeing if there’s anything you either need to tighten your belt on (or if you need to readjust the budget as a whole) would be useful, I think.

Would some kind of callout on the category (or merchant?) that changed by the largest % (or absolute amount perhaps) compared to last month be useful for spotting what might have caused you to go over target?

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Yes, potentially.

If I can see that my shopping budget has increased by Ā£xx pounds and there’s a note that says ā€œbecause I bought flamingo foodā€ then I could be like ā€œah yes, I remember why it’s out nowā€

But - I really do think, personally, you should be able to set a transaction as part of the spend, but not the target. Similar to how you can exclude a transaction from summary. I still want to acknowledge the money has gone, but if it’s planned for I still want to see what’s left of my ā€œbudgetā€

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Yes that would be very helpful indeed.

I think to be particularly useful it’s not just a comparison to last month but the average spend for the last x months by merchant and category, otherwise one rogue month would mess things up for a few months, I think.

I’m here for the sentiment (but I’d rather the budget expand because I’ve told it to account for Christmas gifts rather than not including them). But I think that’s as well as the solution that @avb suggests, because there will still be periods where you do go over budget and you want to find out why.

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Indeed

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Just set mine up, 10% saving here we come! (hopefully)

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I only asked for my credit card spending to be included in my Monzo budget a week ago, and now I can do it, brilliant!

May be the only one, but give me the option to set the Trends tab to my ā€˜home screen’, please! Opposed to my main account screen which includes the Ā£0 left of Ā£1000 budget, but that budget is only for that account. I’d like to see the Target budget there.

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This is exactly how Monzo’s current budget tool works in summary and has done since 2017. I cant believe they are removing it for this shocking ā€˜goals’ replacement. What a downgrade.

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Yet problem with goals. Can someone explain how shared tabs work with goals??

If I spend £50 eating out with a friend and I put it on a shared tab, when they pay half it comes through as a transfer. However, transfers are permanently excluded with goals, so my goal still says £50 spent even though in relaity it was £25.

This is ridiculous.

Because you’ve not changed your friends inbound payment to eating out, to balance it.

Also. When splitting with someone and you send them an SMS with a link, if they use that link it will recognise which payment it is for, and assign accordingly.

If they just send you a transfer from their bank to your monzo details, monzo doesn’t know what it’s for so it is just that. A transfer.

Agreeably using the monzo SMS links are a pain now Apple pay isn’t involved, so people find it easier to just send the general way.

Im hoping someone can help me understand how this is better than the monthly summary. If I want this to be anywhere useful I would have to re-categorise so many transactions and exclude them.

I don’t have any ā€˜target’ spend on shopping etc. just an amount for the month and it goes anywhere.

Before I have excluded items that would be something saved up for months, but now I would have to put that into say bills to exclude it.

Seems like backwards thinking

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