Car Parking Ticket - wrong spending category

Help
1

Ealing Hospital car park lunchtime today, run by APCOA Parking, appears as ‘Eating Out’ in categories.

I know I can manually change the category, just wondering if I’d be entitled to a discount at the hospital coffee shop :joy:

2

Heh, sometimes when a merchant is used for the first time on Monzo, the category can be guessed incorrectly. Manually changing it in your own feed should teach the service to correctly categorise that merchant in the future, though I do think there could be some minor improvements that could be made with more intelligent guessing based on the merchant’s MasterCard category in the future. :thumbsup:

1 Like
3

Thanks Richard, I need to go back on Thursday so I’ll check to see if the category has been corrected :+1:

4

When you make your next transaction on Thursday, your app will (should) default to the category that you’ve set for your last transaction with that merchant. The category that you first saw for this merchant will still be the category that’s applied to everyone else’s transactions though.

As far as I know, Monzo haven’t yet set up a review process to update the default category, based on the category that users select…

5

So who sets the categories for each merchant? A quick look at APCOA website shows they’re all to do with parking enforcement and nothing to do with food outlets!

I set the category as ‘Transport’ since that seems to be the best option and also where my other parking payment went (different car park).

6

I assume that Monzo sets the category based on the merchant’s MCC code, as this is a universal database of codes that are intended to be used for exactly this purpose - to identify which type of business (merchant) is receiving a payment.

It’s possible that APCOA have programmed their terminal incorrectly (so they’re using the wrong MCC code) or that they’re using a terminal from the hospital or something else.

But basically, if the category is assigned based on this code, then I don’t think there’s anything Monzo can do about the code being wrong, in the first instance. And I expect they will create something to get the incorrect categories updated in their database at some point.

1 Like