Better analytics

What I’d really like to see is lots of ways to understand my spending. The pulse is useful because it helps me keep an eye on what’s going on generally, but I’d like to have lots more options, i.e. a table showing what I spent week by week to check that I’m spending roughly in line with my budget. Switching between table and graph. Again the pulse is good, but it doesn’t have X or Y labels. The graph should also show which portions are bills, entertainment, etc. Basically I need to be able to answer the question, what’s my actual average expenditure per week, per month, per year? Very difficult to do with my natwest account.

Perhaps also some machine learning analytics to predict what my spending/balance will be in the future given past trends? Haven’t put much thought into that one…

This morning I topped up £130 from another account I paid cash into for the purposes of sending it to a friend via transferwise. Although technically I spent it, the money was never mine and now it’s harder to get a handle on what I actually spent. Similar situation with paying for dinner and then getting the money back from splitwise. I might have paid £60, but I didn’t actually use that portion of my budget, but now my totals are harder to calculate. Basically I’d like a way to discount certain expenditure from my cashflow.

This might not fit into Mondo, and it would probably work better as a separate app that can draw multiple accounts (including bill sharing apps like splitwise).

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We’d love to do all of that :smiley: (Well, most of it anyway!)

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I like the idea of being able to remove certain payments from analytics.

From this forum it seems like quite a popular idea. It is frustrating to not know how much you are really spending because you lent money or bought something on expenses. I’d like to see it kept completely separate from the actual balance though - perhaps a filter view for the analytics page like ‘exclude expenses’ and also ‘exclude marked transactions’ for things that aren’t part of actual spending.

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I would love this to be true. There a lot of raw data on the app already. I just wish there is better way to analyses it.

I would love to see a line graph showing total spending of each cathagories over monthly period so I can manage and budget better.

Ever better, there an option to change type of graph because if we can see stacked line graph then we can have a total budget per month as the top limit line then each categories spending stacking to this limit line.

Or you could just let us download transaction as Excel spreadsheet.

Yes. Or ability to generate a pie chart showing split between retailers for a category like groceries :grinning:

I’m a big fan of graphs too! Although I appreciate the fact that this won’t be the first thing on every Monzo user’s list of most wanted features.

It sounds like you might be an Android user? On iOS, users can use the search feature to filter their data & then download it into a spreadsheet…search is one of the next items on the roadmap for Android, although it’s not been confirmed (it might be worth asking) that exports will be included yet -

https://community.monzo.com/t/search-on-android/7898?u=alexs

If you’re a developer, you can use the API to access your transaction data, then build graphs for it in an app (my guess is this is how the high-powered analytics tools will be built) & some users have started doing that already

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Thanks for pointing out the export option. I didn’t notice that! (I’m on iOS).

Still, it took me a good hour to format the data (the backwards date - time column is very annoying), put it on Pivot table and format the graph.

I got there in the end and the analysis I received was very interesting.

I just wish it would be easier than this… and be available for everyone to use without Excel knowledge.

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On the same track of better analytics and trend analysis - I’d love to see more options to see how my spending can make me feel great. For example, I love treasure hunting in charity shops, guilt-free holiday shopping! So it’d be great to know over 6 months how much have I given to charity? Which charities have I given to the most? How does my charitable spending compare with other monzo users (when compared to how much I top up). Could I afford to spend more on this past-time?

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A category for Donations to Registered Charities would be good as this would assist users to compile their annual self assessment to the HMRC

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That sounds like it would be really useful for me too.

Perhaps there’s a way for you to get to this already - what if you ‘tagged’ your charity donations by adding a particular emoji (e.g. :reminder_ribbon:) to the transaction’s notes. Then if your search for that emoji (& apply your timeframe filter), you’ll see the total & average spent for all of those transactions.

This is exactly the type of thing that Monzo wants to be able to tell you (along with comparing your travel costs / utility bills / groceries etc. to other user’s) :smiley: Hugo’s described what that might look like (& why we don’t have custom categories) here -

https://community.monzo.com/t/custom-categories-multi-category-transactions/649/14?u=alexs

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Given the number of requests that there’s been for this category, I’d be surprised if a ‘charity’ category isn’t added when they categories are reviewed, after the current accounts launch.

Once it’s been created, you could tag certain donations to distinguish between any that you want to select for you tax assessment & those that you don’t.

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Hi everyone!
I’m moving jobs soon and I’m hoping that my new office won’t be surrounded by so many tantalising lunch options and I’ll start bringing my lunch in.

This got me thinking about how I’d like to be able see more custom charts in Monzo.

It would be really useful if I could see if there are trends to my searches like I eat out more in the summer or buy more Xbox games when it’s cold outside! This could also be done against specific merchants so I can tell if I really am cutting back or just fooling myself.

I appreciate I can currently scroll through months on the spending tabs for specific categories but I think it would help me if I could have a graph with a line for my target and then I could see if I was trending towards it.

I imagine this would be a tonne of work and there are lots of parts to consider but I’d be interested to know if this is something the team is considering.

I’d be keen to analyse my data in more detail too. But since there’s so many different types of analysis that power users will want to do, I’m guessing that Monzo will leave 3rd party developers to build custom graphs / apps for users like yourself, once the API is ready.

I was actually considering putting “please don’t recommend the api” at the bottom of my comment :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:. I’d rather not give any 3rd party access to my data but that’s a different conversation for a different thread/day…

I think this use case is fairly general and could be useful for most users maybe others will disagree.

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For me, for banking itself I’d be very hesitant to give a 3rd party access. However if monzo added a transaction history only permission to the API that would be very useful. To be honest I doubt they would be keen on making an API that allows anyone with the keys to move money around. But then who knows, they’ve done a lot of things I wouldn’t have thought were possible!

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I’m sure they’ll come up with a sensible way of implementing it. For instance the app could pop-up a confirmation when an API tries to take payments out of your account. They could also allow apps to become trusted to take smaller usage when they’re established or you’ve used them a lot, etc.