Add Expenses + Another Category to the Same Transaction

[alexs (Alex Sherwood)]

Hey nagra,

Thank you for not making this another post about custom categories!

One of the ideas that have been suggested when looking for a solution to the custom categories problem, is creating sub-categories for transactions. However, I expect these would be more granular categories, while the main (parent) categories remain the same (& only one could be applied to each transaction, here’s Hugo’s explanation for why multiple categories can’t be applied to a single transaction ).

@hugo

1. If you use more than 1 tag per transaction (for example, a meal could be #lunch and #food) then we couldn’t give you easy comparison tools because the totals per tag wouldn’t add up. For some people that’s not a problem (they understand exactly how the calculations are made) but for others it will be confusing “How’s that possible that this week I’ve spent £50 on #food and £30 #lunch but I’ve only spent £50 in total?”.

There are ways to solve that but it’s one of those cases where (I think) reducing the complexity in the first place is the only acceptable solution. Yes, it’s a bit less powerful, but it’s way easier to understand and use for the average user.

I think the reason why there’s a dedicated Expenses category, is that you wouldn’t want spending on Eating Out, that will be reimbursed by your employer, to count against your Target for that category. Could you talk us through how this would be beneficial for you?

If you’re looking for a breakdown of your monthly spending on Expenses, I guess this would need a dedicated view & set of categories (so that it doesn’t impact your Targets or Monzo’s aggregation - see the post I quoted for more details) but that would potentially confuse some users…