Love this update, it’s a step closer to seeing direct equivalents to my finance dashboard spreadsheets within the app.
I have a few observations/suggestions:
Firstly, I think I’ve found a quirk related to archive pots.
In short, when you archive a pot, trends shows the incoming funds because they’re part of your account feed, but doesn’t typically show the outgoing funds from the pot (because archived pots are not shown by default, you have to specifically click to include them). The result is a bump up in overall balance:
I archived a savings pot on a Saturday back in mid-April. Then put that money in a new savings pot when it arrived in my account on the Monday. The arrival of the funds is shown, but not the withdrawal as that’s from the archived pot; leading to an increase in balance.
I think this is all working as expected; you are shown exactly what you’ve asked to see. But its maybe not intuitive, it took me a minute or two to figure out why my balance jumped in April and why it didn’t align with my financial dashboards and its because archived pots are hidden by default.
Secondly, I’m paid last working day of the month and always Get Paid Early™. I then shuffle the money into pots the next day. So my typical trend graphs looks like this:
The peak value is so much higher than the working balance throughout the month that this view is difficult to interpret.
I resolve this “issue” in my own speadsheets by artificially limiting the y axis like this (same data as the trends graph above):
I also show the previous months underlaid on the same graph, but understand this could get messy and unintuitive for most users.
Not suggesting trends necessarily replicates either of these things, just pointing them out as general observations.
Also only showing the max, minimum and estimated end balance in the y axis labels coupled with only having horizontal grid lines at 1/3rd and 2/3rds of max balance (rather than at intervals of say 1, 10, 100 or 1000) all make it quite difficult to discern the value at any given point along the line.
Thirdly, this one isn’t directly related to trends but highlighted by the dips in my trends graph;
When you take money out of an easy access savings account it arrives the next day. Which is fine. But in the meantime it vanishes from both the pot balance and your account balance for the period between asking for the funds and the funds arriving the next working day. This results in these little dips in my overall balance. Which again is fine… just a little annoying haha. Not sure what the solution would be here or if one is a solution is even warranted.
Finally, if I’m going to use trends often I’m definitely going to find myself needing to interact with the filters menu a lot. There is a reason why I have 6 separate graphs in my finance spreadsheets;
To achieve similar graphs in trends, I’ll need to manually pick which accounts and pots I’m interested in by tediously checking and unchecking dozens of boxes which if I’m honest I’m not going to be bothered to do. Checking all those boxes every time is enough friction to cause me to just open my own spreadsheet instead.
So my suggestion would be to add some simple presets to this filters menu:
Select all and Deselect all would help massively, but beyond that you could also have things like;
- All accounts
- All active pots
- All archived pots
- All savings pots from other providers
- All external accounts
- Let me pick individually (which takes you to the current filter menu)