Categories for transactions

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Struggling to get categories working for me. How do you manage it?

I have a Monzo account, Joint account and Amex which is linked. The wife has a Monzo account and an external account.

So a bills pot in the joint gets topped up by both of us on payday, and DD for shared costs comes from that for the bills we need to pay.

Easy - one ‘transfer’ to ‘bills’, and DD ‘bills’ expense categorisation.

Use the amex card a transaction is an; ‘expense’ or ‘eating out’ / etc, but then a credit to the amex is a ‘transfer’? Or ‘finance’? What is finance - conceptually a transfer is payment between accounts so credit repay is finance, but that then shows a credit to offset the expense in the amex so there is no spending - so a credit payment is a transfer so it’s excluded from spending. But transfers is flooded with transactions between bills put and the joint account for the DDs, can’t transfers between accounts and virtual pots be excluded (they aren’t actually going out the account so why show them!).

Feels like the budgets are a total mess.

What do you categorise as ‘family’? Surely these are expenses like clothes which is shopping or entertainment etc?

Transfers to the wife’s account from joint, are these expenses as they leave “our” accounts (i.e. joint account, our amex and my account) or transfers to a third party (the wife).

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I have literally the exact same setup and the exact same issue. You are not alone. Feels sometimes like Monzo don’t have a development team working on improving the app any more. They really should respond here in these threads.

My thoughts here are that the “Pots” functionality is simply not fully developed, and the logic is not worked out. For example, why can’t I make a personal bank transfer from a pot?

As such, I’m thinking it is best to ditch pots and just use the normal budgeting categories in hopes that at least the budget features will start to work.

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What would you like them to say? Pots are not accounts but you can make a scheduled transfer from a pot to another account.

Pots/virtual cards/categories are kinda deliberately vague because people use them in so many different ways. The more topics like this that you read, you’ll find people on complete opposite ends of the scale. Some are splitting every single purchase with a partner to make sure they get their 94p back, some are using 50 categories, 20 pots with 5 different virtual cards, some do all their spending on a credit card and clear it at the end, some do the same with Flex, some just top the account up, spend, the top it up some more.

Some of it I find too convoluted now. I don’t bother with virtual cards from a pot as I find it more hassle. I used to have an IFTTT script that would replenish but again, it became too much to manage. I used to have more and more pots for each thing but I’ve trimmed that right down, partly due to the Monzo interest fiasco, but I actually prefer it this way now.

I have my salary in, salary sort, joint account transfer. I have 3 pots. One to keep money aside for glasses/contacts so I have the money there for them, one for my bills/investments/external savings, this pot just auto-empties with transfers etc. Then the last one is my savings.

Anything that leaves my account is categorised. If it hasn’t left my account, i.e. gone to a pot, then I don’t class it as spending. Then it’s completely up to you if your work lunch is an expense, lunch, eating out, sandwiches or however deep you want to go with your categories. I have 19 now, some I’ve stopped using at it seemed too granular, some I expand so I can track them on their own.

Then I set target in Trends to match my budget and then I can see where I’m at. I don’t bother with the other two and I make sure I have the ones excluded so that it tallies.

(Writing this out now, I probably need an eyes :eyes: category so that glasses/contacts are separated out from Personal Care which has any other sort of drugs/haircuts in.