[Android] Repeated ("subscription") payments cannot be classified retrospectively without generating duplicate entries

Issue:
Upcoming / repeated / subscription payments (as it is named variously throughout the app) cannot be classified retrospectively without generating duplicate entries. This may be related to this issue, but as that one has no steps to reproduce it is hard to discern whether they have the same root cause.

Details to reproduce:

  1. Set up a payment with a provider via card (not Direct Debit), which will be repeated on a schedule; for instance, set up an Amazon Prime subscription, which will be debited monthly.
  2. Wait until you have two or three historical debits.
  3. Now go to the transaction details screen for the first one. Move the “Repeating payment” slider to on. Repeat this process for subsequent payments.
  4. Visit Summary > Committed Spending and observe that for previous months the payments are correctly categorised under, say, bills.
  5. Visit Summary > Committed Spending for the current month and observe the repeated greyed out entries as shown in the screenshot before.

Note: the ideal desired behaviour is for all transactions to automatically be grouped in the same chain. It shouldn’t be possible to, as we have done here, create duplicate subscriptions because Monzo should be able to detect that they are linked by default.

This may also affect the spending summary - wrongly counting each repeated one and totalling them, rather than just counting once (have not verified).

OS:
Android

Device:
Google Pixel 1 XL

App Version:
2.19.1

Screenshots:
Screenshot_20181110-171722_2

1 Like

I’ve found in the past that it is only be necessary to mark the most recent transaction as a subscription for it to be correctly predicted in the next month, no need to do the same for the previous ones.

I think this feature is working as intended as you might indeed have multiple repeating subscriptions with the same merchant and would want all of them to be predicted.

Yes, it works for subsequent transactions, but not retrospectively.

The app doesn’t automatically go back and apply this retrospectively, which means you end up with one set of months (before the date you marked it as repeated) with it classified in one place (on Summary > Committed Spending), and all subsequent months with it classified in another. The transactions should appear in a consistent place across months regardless of when the user told Monzo that the transaction was repeated.

Yes, I am aware that this is precisely what is happening. But if I remove the checkmark from each of them then the transaction appears in the wrong place. So, you see, at the moment it’s either “have historical transactions classified under the wrong place” or “have the spending screen show them up as separate subscriptions”. Neither is good. And the correct solution is for that slider to take account of both future transactions (as it does), and past transactions, which it doesn’t. Given that Monzo can detect the transactions as being from the same merchant in the future, I think that it’s just a bug that the same logic wasn’t also applied retrospectively (because after all, it’s the same logic, just finding a chain of transactions in the other direction)