It just does not work for me. I budget by having £200 come out of a pot every Thursday morning. The graph is just meaningless, I don’t really know what I’m looking at, it doesn’t really tell me anything.
Thanks for the tip, I shall have to try and get the sorting done on the same day next month and see what difference it makes.
Seems to be working pretty well for me (Monzo Plus). I move enough on pay day into a bills pot for all the direct debits then pay for other stuff on a couple of credit cards (all connected to Monzo). Having bills paid from a pot doesn’t seem to break it in any way and the balance graph makes sense, although it’s showing the net total with all the connected accounts included.
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I have this too. But actually after using it for a week I’ve found it quite useful looking at the rate of descent from the spike helps me understand my burn rate
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I still haven’t got the new version of trends sadly.
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I believe it may have been mentioned before, but after looking at the new Balance tab I don’t understand:
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how the starting balance is calculated; this figure is not the same as the previous month’s ending balance for any of the months I’ve scrolled back to
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how on earth they have not caught the fact it included categories marked as “exclude from spending”
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why are Transfers included as income without any way to exclude them
EDIT: It also lacks the same thing all othrr aggregators lack: the ability to mark a connected account as joint, so as to only take into account half its balance (or, as I have seen in one app, the ability to set what % of that account’s balance and spending should be included in your own stats)
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Will it be today for the rest of us 
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The blurb under the toggle says “transactions in this category won’t be marked as spending in Trends”, so that leads the user to believe it is indeed excluding the transaction from any and all Trends reports.
That’s the only toggle there is
Erm, I think we are talking about the same thing.
I am in that same screen, the toggle is titled ‘exclude from spending’, and undeneath it it says ‘will not be counted as spending in Trends’ if you enable the toggle.
I have enabled the toggle for a specific category, but that category still shows as expenditure and is counted as such in the new ‘Balance’ tab in Trends. This must be a bug.
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Maybe its early and my brain isn’t firing yet, but wouldn’t it be problematic to exclude a spending category from your balance? It makes sense to exclude a category from your spending, but surely excluding it from your balance will just result in an inaccurate balance?
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No. That’s because Monzo doesn’t cater for joint connected accounts or joint spending in a native way - the only way to make sure that a £50 transaction from a joint account as a restaurant is recorded as £25 for me is to split the transaction into two categories, one being “Wife’s spend” or something like that, and exclude that category from any reporting.
Hmm I guess so. I guess it depends on how you approach your joint finances. The only sense in which I consider our joint account to be 50/50 ownership is when tallying up my overall balance over time to get a sense of my net worth. In every other way, its more important to me to have sight of the actual balance of the joint account, to know whether or not we can afford whatever we’re about to spend money on.
I wouldn’t be opposed to a ‘50% ownership’ toggle for when viewing joint account balances, but excluding categories from balances feels like trying to use the wrong tool for the job.
But this graph is tracking you balance, not your spending. It doesn’t care whether the outgoing transaction was a bill, a sneaky coffee, or a transfer to a savings account. All it cares about is that that money is no longer part of your balance, and that’s what it shows you.
Spend tracking is all about tracking discretionay spend, so that you can see what you’ve been doing, and maybe change the habits, or at least control them to stay within your means. It focuses on short term budgeting, typically week by week, or rest of the month timescales.
Balance tracking is more holistic, and is about tracking the actual amount you have in your account(s). It’s not about telling you whether you can afford a coffee, but more about looking at the past year to see that you’re steadily building up our savings, or eroding them. It looks at much longer timescales, and trends in your balance, rather than being so item-focussed.
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All the more important to show me the correct balance then 
I can take half of the balance in our joint account and go buy a motorcycle. I can’t take more than half as it’s not mine and would probably result in me sleeping in the garage for the forseeable 
So I would expect any reporting tool like Trends to handle this accordingly.
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Just make sure you buy a pillow with the motorcycle then 
Problem is, there are probably as many ways of people managing joint accounts as there are people with joint accounts. Some people only have a joint account, and no personal accounts at all (yeah, I know Monzo requires them, but most other banks don’t). Some only use joint for bills, so 100% of the money in there is already committed. Some use it for bills + variable essential spending (food), so all the money is in there, and it is only at end of month that it’s split up and available to the partners. It would be rather developer expensive for Monzo to try and cover every single base, and if there were 10 different ways to filter what showed in Trends, there would be support tickets on a daily basis from people who were in the wrong view because they didn’t understand it.
Fundamentally, no app is ever going to be able to know what money you can extract from each connected account, and whether or not that bike purchas is going to impact on your sleeping arrangements.
Indeed.
But it’s not that difficult. Monzo is already halfway there as it allows to split any transaction into two (or more) parts and set exactly the value of each part.
It’s a small step to being able to define a % ownership of a specific account balance (another aggregator does this, I forget which, might be Emma or Money Dashboard?) and getting Trends to fully support that. Then it will be useful for the majority of different ways of managing joint finances.
I think your situation is quite unique really.
Monzo are never going to be able (or worthwhile) catering to all the niche ways that people manage their money.
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Again it depends on how you use a joint account. Personally we use the joint account almost exclusively for joint spending like bills, food, utilities, holidays and house spending. Personal spending like for a motorbike would either come from the joint savings (resulting in my partner being ‘owed’ the same value from the joint savings to balance the books) or a bike would be bought with personal account savings.
Surely its not strictly true that you can spend 50% of the joint account balance on a bike without then having to take some kind of action to balance the books, because there are things you both need to contribute funds towards.
The way that we try to view the joint account balance (in all cases aside from when I’m trying to calculate net worth) is that the balance is simply joint owned with joint responsibility and isn’t owned 50/50. I think that’s even the case in the T&Cs for a joint account, its shared ownership, not split ownership of the funds.
Can anyone tell me if Bill Spaces from Starling are pulled through into the prediction side of things in Monzo?