forgive me for not putting this in the correct place in the forum, I’m not a regular poster on here, and dont fully understand how it works - hopefully someone can move it to the right place. I’m nearing retirement, and want an (easyish) way to analyse my spending. I dont really like monzo’s default tools, I find them very clunky and unclear. I guess I need to use open banking, and download the transactions - all I want to achieve is basic categorisation so I can see how much I spend on bills, food, travel etc nice & clearly, by month - in graph form would be nice. I’m not proficient in excel enough to do it myself. Many decades ago I used Quicken, which was great. Any suggestions? I’d prefer a PC based solution rather than a phone app, but am open to anything.
You wouldn’t need open banking if all your spending is with Monzo, but a paid plan would be needed if you wanted to add in your accounts elsewhere.
Trends - this shows your monthly spending by merchant or by category.
You can also tap any transaction (Monzo or external linked account) and change the category, which will reflect in Trends too.
all my spending is with monzo, but I find trends just a big confusing, mess to use to be honest! if you’re sayings its good, and does what I need, then I will invest spending more time trying to get to grips with it. cheers for your reply.
My default is with YNAB but I’m conscious that it has a cost to it and can be a steep learning curve, but it does allow you to put almost everything in financially - it’s my absolute financial centre.
I’d definitely play around with Trends a bit more but if you do find it’s not for you then Excel isn’t that hard to get to grips with, especially if you just need/want to do some basic budgeting and graphs. I don’t do a massive amount of budgeting but I do use Numbers on a Mac to give me an idea of my usual monthly income and outgoings and then update that every few months e.g. my current budget for groceries is around £600 a month so I will look at my grocery category over the last few months and adjust the numbers on the spreadsheet as needed.
Does Revolut do this even with other bank connexions? (via open banking)
Yes but it uses their own categories so you’ll have to re-categorise a lot of your spending
They do, and they’ve just introduced categorisation for linked accounts - it’s not as good as Monzo tho so you’d need to change them often.
Do they do overall analytics though? As in connected accounts and your main Revolut account combined?
It used to as that’s how I figured it was annoying, you can view them separately but not together for now.
Ah I see. That’s annoying. I’d like a combined accounts analytics.
thanks for all the comments. I’ve ended up signing up for ‘extra’, adding my four kakeibo (japanese budgeting) categories, re-categorised a years worth of transactions and will give ‘trends’ a proper go. cheers.
edit :- a few days on, really getting on well with trends now, after sorting out all my data it does exactly what I need. like all tools, it requires a bit of initial effort and learning, but once working its quite impressive. thank you all.