Assigning payments to multiple categories can be a frustrating experience

Feedback & Ideas
#1

I’ve recently upgraded to the Plus account and I’m really enjoying it so far.

I went to split my first payment into multiple categories this morning and just find it to be a truly horrible experience. While the support staff are lovely, sending feedback via in-app help seems to be akin to sending things into the void, and I can’t find a similar thread on here so I’ll outline some of my issues with it.

Even as a lead UI designer and developer, not all of my ideas are fantastic, and I understand that everyone wants something slightly different, but I hope I’m not the only one having trouble:

  • Having to select categories in advance is annoying. It means having to figure all of that out in advance, which might be good practice, but is unlikely to be the case all of the time. It would be nice to be able to ‘add another category’, like you can for payees when splitting a payment between multiple people.
  • The idea of automatically assigning amounts to other categories when filling one in is a nice idea, but in practice it’s infuriating. It seemingly assigns amounts at random, and repeatedly overwrites something you’ve already manually entered after changing the amount in one of the other categories. It would be much nicer to just let you manually type things in and show you if you haven’t accounted for the whole balance yet.
  • If the bill was split originally - e.g. groceries between me and my partner - even after requesting and receiving payments for those splits - I have to account for them in categories, meaning I have to assign an amount that doesn’t really have anything to do with me to a category. It would be nicer if it just ignored amounts requested from other people.
#2

Mine did it automatically

#3

Not sure if there’s a thread on this already, but totally agree. It’s an absolute nightmare the way Monzo does it currently.

Paid off a big credit card bill in one, wanted to split between about 7 categories, was very difficult to get right :mask:

On a slightly related note, the fact that when you bill split and want to change the number, you have to first delete whatever is in the box before you can retype is also shoddy. I think the whole flow around splitting payments, whether between categories or people, needs some attention.

#4

Sorry if there’s a more appropriate place, but bumping this to ask for…

The ability to partially exclude a transaction / exclude one category when assigning more than one.

The time this really matters for me is when paying off my credit card bill in a month when I’ve bought things for my partner or for some friends (e.g. multiple tickets to same event). Currently the only way to stop these amounts destroying my budget/summary for the rest of the month is to make multiple transactions to pay off my credit card.

This is something which would be so helpful when assigning multiple categories - either a way to exclude one specific category on that transaction, or just to assign an amount to an ‘excluded’ category, maybe akin to the new transfer/income ones that have been created for connected accounts? @tomdavies, @tjvr :slight_smile:

#5

We’re hoping to bring the Income, Transfer & Savings categories to Monzo accounts at some point soon, which should hopefully help with your situation!

4 Likes
#6

This is good news!

So if I split a £100 transaction into £50 clothes and £50 transfer…that would only show my summary going down by £50?

#7

Not sure if I’m going mad but I think this is better now… (nearly used the word fixed but don’t wanna go that far)

I split a transaction today and thought something was different.

I then tested it out with a £1 transaction and chose four categories.

The behaviour now seems to be that the first/top category will always be the one affected if you change any of the below.

And now if you change the top one, it seems that only the bottom category will be affected.

It’s definitely not fixed, and still extremely odd, but seems better than the seemingly random changing of amounts/categories that it used to be.

2 Likes
#8

Yeah I’d noticed that it has been much easier recently. It’s a shame there was no mention of it or no reply here, though.

I can live with how it works now - only changing the other categories, after which the first one should be correct by default - but it would still be nice to be able to add categories on the fly without having to decide them beforehand.

1 Like
#9

Yeah agreed. Still room for improvement for sure.