Assign transaction to pot / button to withdraw exact transaction amount from pot

Loving the new pay bills from pot feature.

What I want to see now is option to pay any transaction from a pot?

Scenario. I have a birthdays pot and I go to the shop and buy a present for a friends birthday. I want to click in that transaction and pay directly from the birthdays pot rather than manually transferring the money from birthdays to main account. This would also by pass the spending categories as it’s coming from savings pot.

Thoughts ? Anyone else want to see something like this ?

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You’d have to set the Pot before the transaction is made, I’d think?

Not sure which vendor would allow you to pay for something, somehow have it ‘held’ while you decide which Pot to pay it from?

Hi all, am new to Monzo and Came to the forums looking for how to do this.

I would like to be able to have transactions listed as coming from a pot. additionally I don’t want to have to manually move the money from a pot to the main account before I spend - else risk the transaction declining due to not enough funds.

I’m happy to flag/allocate the transaction after the purchase.

Maybe there needs to be two kinds of pots? Savings pots (work similar to current setup) and budget pots. Where the budget pots (in a way) exist as part of the main account balance?

Example: total money on Monzo £1000. £500 in holiday savings pot, £250 in home/diy budget pot, £100 in going out budget pot and a remaining account balance of £150.

my account balance shows as £150, but if I make a purchase of £200 on some new fence panels after a storm the purchase won’t decline, the app will let me know I need to assign the money from an existing budget pot. (Maybe grey out all the pot totals until I do this)

Cheers :slight_smile:

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Hi Paul & welcome :wave:

The ‘Bills Pots’ feature does this for Direct Debits and Standing Orders/Recurring scheduled transactions. It doesn’t yet handle subscriptions, but it does what you describe - it moves the same amount out of the assigned pot and into the main account just before the assigned payment is taken from the main account.

And if you don’t have enough in the pot, it will take the amount (or the remainder of the amount) from the main account. It works really well.

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I would really benefit from having this feature - I’m sure you can automate the functionality with IFTTT, but I’d love it if it was built in to the app. As other people have mentioned, it could work very similarly to the bills payments, but for one-off purchases. The benefits would be ease of use, robustness and flexibility, and most importantly a clean purchase history on your main account.

This would be exceedingly useful for gifts, or personal projects - things which need more separation than budget categories, and aren’t regular month to month - these lend themselves much better to pots.

I envision it working like this:

  • you make a purchase
  • you click the purchase for more options, and perhaps under the ‘add to shared tab’ there could be the option ‘pay from pot’
  • when clicked, it moves the purchase from the main card history into the pot history. That way you have the purchase details in the pot history, and avoid it cluttering up your main transactions. It could also be automatically excluded from budget allowance.
  • on a technical level, money equal to the purchase value would be moved from your pot to your main account to refund the transaction, but it would look as if the purchase had come directly from the pot
  • to increase the visibility of these assigned purchases, you could display the pot history automatically on the pot overview (when you swipe sideways to the pot from main account), under the pot summaries and actions. Pot summaries and actions could be condensed into one line, next to each other, to make pot history visible more easily.

In addition, there could be an option to change to paying directly out of a put for your next purchase(s), or untill you change it back. This switch to where payment was coming from could also be provided as an IFTTT service.

Another option (perhaps less useful) could be the ability to set purchases from certain merchants to always be paid out of a certain pot, maybe given the option when moving a payment to a pot.

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When I receive money from someone, sometimes I want to put that money straight into a pot, or transfer it into my joint account. E.g. when I get expenses back from work, I transfer it into a savings pot.

At the moment, I have to go to the pot or the Payments tab to transfer the money in and manually enter the amount. It would be useful to be able to click on the transaction in my feed and ‘forward’ it into a pot or account, without having to type in the amount

This is a fine idea (though feels like I have heard it already suggested on here) and I imagine something they could get to once other developments, in work, are finished

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Removed Posts - November

This feature has already been suggested. You can vote for it here:

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A quick thank you to @awjdean for their ever diligent work in spotting duplicate threads!

I’ve merged an older thread in here, which is why the dates might jump around a bit. I don’t think it affects the flow of conversation, though. And, perhaps more importantly, I’ve discovered that merging does bring the votes over! :ballot_box: :raised_hands:

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Now Bill Pots is here I do hope more features like this happen. Would make budgeting so much better for me.

For anyone browsing wanting the same, you can make specific integrations like this using IFTTT, (with “Specific Merchant” integration), or, for a cranked to 11 version, you can use IFTTT Platform to add custom code too - so you could have one applet for multiple vendors, or add category, location, value filters too. But requires some coding skillz.

Anyway, +1 vote for this feature!

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It doesn’t bring over duplicate votes tho

Which I guess is what we want

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This’d be great. Currently collecting money from people for a colleague’s leaving present… Would be perfect if I could assign incoming money to the pot rather than have duplicate transactions where I receive money and then move it to the pot.

Suppose an alternative approach would be to use shared tabs, but given I don’t know how generous / stingey ppl will be, thought pots were more appropriate…

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+100 for this. Compared with almost any other feature, this is one of the easiest to make. On a transaction line, after I’ve paid, I want to just select which pot to withdraw the quantity from.

When we have finally have custom categories, I want to assign one of them as a pot’s default category, which will be used to categorise the item.

It would also be nice to pre-emptively pay from pot.

I don’t know how to avoid the double entries in the transaction history, but it’s not a huge problem for me personally - apart from right now I have to guess that they are related by the identical quantity. Custom categories and default pot categories would solve.

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A halfway point for the developers might be to at least assign a (or multiple) spending categories to a pot.

For example, I have a “Food, groceries etc” pot which I transfer a set sum in to each month. Likewise a “Recreation” pot.

I’d like then for all shopping (Sainsburys, Waitrose, Tesco, etc), basically anything that has a “Groceries” category assigned to it to automatically be deducted from my “Food, groceries etc” pot. And for the “Recreation” pot, anything tagged with “Eating out” and “Entertainment”.

Seems to me lots of people mix up pots and categories/budgets.

Making certain categories automatically come from a pot is dangerous because you can’t guarantee categories will be correct.

Waiting until a payment has been made and moving money once you categorise it wouldn’t work because the payment has to be made upfront.

Categories are best used for spend from your main balance and arranged budgets.

Pots are better for irregular spend where you’ll either move the money in advance or replace the spent money after the fact.

Having the money spent straight from a pot would be ideal but presumably complicated, maybe a toggle button

But it seems like it would be quite easy (guessing) to implement an option to ‘reimburse’ the main balance from a pot while also excluding from budgets. This would only work for spend where the main balance is sufficient in the first place. Larger payments would still need some foresight to move the pot money before the transaction

I moved to Monzo because of the functionality of being able to manage my money and thought I’d be able to ditch my spreadsheet where I had my own pots for clothes, holiday, home, gifts etc where I allocated a budget each month, let it accrue and deducted spending against those things when they came up.

I’d love it if I could categorise a payment to a pot once spent, ie. review, hit a button “allocate from pot” or something and it automatically comes out of that pot and sits underneath it statement-wise and then I know where I’m at in terms of what each pot has left for spending at a future date, and I can see what I spent from it and where etc.

It would also be helpful if you could sometimes split the category?

Argh, just trying to set this up myself and come across this limitation.

Assigning regular bills from pots is fine but when trying to save money for incidentals associated with big projects (in our case it’s also DIY) then being able to assign a individual transactions to have come from a pot would be ideal.

I mean, even as a first draft, I would appreciate being being able to just have a “transfer from pot” button that automatically populates the value I’m going to shuffle around.

In an ideal world it would be amazing to have £0 balance in our joint account and get a notification with every transaction asking us what pot to pull from - as it’s not always going to be the case that every “Home Depot” purchase relates to one pot, as we’ve got multiple projects on the go at once.

You can do it with IFTTT, but in your example you would need £100 in your “Home Depot” pot AND in your main balance.

You spend £99.32 at Home Depot
Your balance reduces by £99.32
£99.32 comes back into your account from your Home Depot Pot.

As above, or enable your overdraft (if you’re eligible) as you won’t be charged if the trigger happens and moves it from a pot straight away.