A morning experience: bills pot and scheduled pot transfers

[Peter_G]

Consider this a plea/prayer to the Monzo gods (or to @bruno)

This morning I decided that I was going to stop relying on Summary and use bill pots properly.

I set up my bill pot. All good. I’m on Android, so I reorder my pots. No problems.

I then add my direct debits to a pot. The select DD screen doesn’t have my new order for pots. But I can live with this. The “you’re good to go” confirmation splash screen is annoying. And I might like to do this in bulk. But so far so good.

I’m now at the stage where I want to schedule money to go into my bill pot. But first I need to know how much. First bit of feedback: I really need to see the predicated total of all DDs assigned to a pot. I can’t, so I flip to my calculator app and laboriously add it all up.

I then go to create a scheduled payment. I copy the number from the calculator and go to paste it into the pots transfer screen. Second bit of feedback: you can’t paste numbers into this screen. So I type it in. No biggy.

I tap set scheduled deposit at the bottom. Nothing happens. Then the amount I’d typed in changes. But the button looks like it works now. I change the number back. Doesn’t work. Number changes. Then I work out that your can only schedule a deposit for the total amount that you have in your current account today (plus the value of any overdraft). This is illogical - I’m setting this up for just after payday where I will have more money. Third bit of feedback: allow scheduled pot transfers of any value.

So I decide to set up individual transfers of the value of each bill into the pot. I think that might be better anyway because then I can see what’s what and change one if the amount changes. I start doing this and select the 31st March for the transfer. Then I remember why I didn’t do this last month. Fourth bit of feedback: you can’t schedule a payment for the last day of the month of the month has less than 31 days. That’s annoying.

I plough on. Then I realise that I’ve made a mistake on one of the values. Never mind, says me, I’ll change it. Pop to the payments tab. I can see it there but the only option is to cancel it. Ah yes: fifth bit of feedback: pot transfers and external transfers have different interfaces and different locations. It’s confusing. And I can’t edit it anywhere. Sixth bit of feedback: you can’t edit pot transfers, only cancel them.

By this time I’m wondering if this is worth it and what Anne (of Starling Bank fame) was on about a few months ago when she was teasing a better way to segregate bills and spending money.

I plough on regardless.

I get to my mortgage. It’s a big payment and I’m overpaying it at the moment. I’ve also just moved some money to savings so my account is running on fumes. This means that for this one payment I don’t have enough money in my account cover my mortgage now. But that’s okay as this is a scheduled payment for when I will have the money. But no. Monzo says no. Let’s go back to the third bit of feedback: allow pot transfers of any value. I mean, this is just silly. I’m now having to create a number of scheduled pot transfers to add up to the value of one transfer, which is actually one of many transfers because this screen isn’t really designed for a current account and is a hang over from spending card days when it kinda made sense. But I digress.

Anyway, you’ll be pleased to know that I finished up with only making one accidental pot transfer for today, only having to delete two transfers because I got something wrong. And that I had a lovely bit of bacon on toast as a consolidation present afterwards.

So, Monzo gods (or Bruno), hear my prayer:

Can we please stop treating pot transfers and external payments differently from a UI perspective?
Can we get rid of arbitrary limits for scheduled pot transfers based on today’s balance when all it does is create frustration and has no utility for anyone?
Can we have better options to schedule payments, please? An explicit “last day of the month” would be a good start. An “after salary has been received” (or after £x amount from payee y) would be an even better one
But maybe, just maybe, we could avoid all of this by automating this workflow somehow?

If you must, give me advanced rules based payments as part of Plus. The rest of it feels like an eating your vegetables thing, though.

Thank you Monzo gods (and Bruno).

‍♂

[davidwalton (Award Winning Hot Coral Analyst)]

I’ve got used to the shortcomings and niggles by using workarounds, but it could be much better overall as @Peter_G has detailed very well above.

[PaulUK]

Excellent post Peter, and many of us have shared some, if not all of those frustrations.

Did you post it in the Monzo Chat deliberately, as some of your points are for sure in other Feedback and Ideas threads?

I think that if there is a most appropriate existing thread with votes attached to already, your post may encourage more votes in that thread.

I have not moved your post as you are a Coral Crew member and outrank me anyway

[Peter_G]

@PaulUK

you are a Coral Crew member and outrank me anyway

I’m not sure there’s such thing as rank around here!

I didn’t put it in feedback because I’m not sure what people would be voting for explicitly - it was more meant as a real life scenario rather than a feature request, I suppose.

But happy to move it if that’s the consensus? Or if there’s a better thread I’m happy to merge it!

[Demmedelusive (Graham)]

Superb narrative, Peter, and a god-send for the developers, methinks.

[BritishLibrary]

@Peter_G

So, Monzo gods (or Bruno),

My only comment: Is this an inclusive or exclusive “or”?

[StuartL (Stuart)]

Great post, I think being able to tweak the salary sorter throughout the month would help with some of the issues with scheduled pot payments; I know it would be all I needed.
But I agree that standard scheduled payments to pots should come with more functionality and flexibility in general.

[sticklebricks]

Great post. It’s quite amazing, for how good Monzo is in places, how annoying scheduled transfers and edits can be.

[Juggy69]

Don’t have the scheduled payment pot issue on iOS latest TF version, surely this can’t be a parity issue or user error @Peter_G

Just asking as in ur post u select schedule payment button, but don’t say if you have set a date from immediate?

I also tried the Immediate schedule for £500 on the schedule button was “active” as soo as you added even a penny, allowed be to press schedule and popped up with the message declined, but I think it should do what @Peter_G is doing if not enough funds and doesn’t allow it, just to stop a declined notification

Always been an issue to edit scheduled pot transfers

[gmclean]

This is a great post, and a troubling one.

It seems like this is what most people would go through when setting up Bill Pots etc, which means this is the user story for this item, yet for so many UI issues (decisions made by developers) to be cropping up it suggests that the overall usage of this hasn’t been considered properly. From experience, it’s easy to forget the user journey during development, you set one up at the start, build your features/work tasks round it and then as things evolve… you forget to go back.

Monzo UI is starting to show signs of this elsewhere, a focus on building features in isolation that don’t sit well together when considered as part of the whole experience. I think this post is the most detailed/best example I’ve seen that highlights this issue.

That said, there isn’t anything here that a few sprints of ‘clean up’ couldn’t sort!

[Peter_G]

A redux:

The end of the month came. Then I realised that I had some pots transfers for the 1st instead of the 31st. So I go through the pain of deleting and replacing. Only to realise that there are only 30 days in April - so now I need to set up a monthly recurring transfer from 31st May. And set up a one off payment for 30th April.

And I think “ah ha”, I’ve now money in my account, I can combine some of the payments I’ve split up. But because I can’t add a note / reference to pots transfers it’s super unclear what’s for what. And I’m not going to restart and go through all that again.