Company expenses

I’ve only just started using it so not sure how it will work out. I still have to submit my expences on bespoke work software and keep copies of receipts. It is how ever v. helpful to be able to filter the Mondo feed by flagging my expences so I don’t have to go through the whole feed at the end of the month trying to remember what was and wasn’t expences.

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Cool. I can see where that is helpful.

you can export any of it yet check out sneek preview of new search coming soon.

Concour is the system

Yes, it would be great to export this with receipts and notes.

Currently, each month I have to hand all my receipts with notes regarding expenses. If mondo could put the photos of receipts combined with notes and transactions that would be fantastic!!!

Agree this would be a great feature

Great idea and to me would be a fantastic feature.

I am self employed and would help being able to export for Accounts, Tax Returns, HMRC etc.

:slight_smile:

Regarding this has you tried 1tap?

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One tap? Can you explain?

Cheers

I assume he’s referring to http://www.1tapreceipts.com/

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It’s an app that helps people auto extract data from receipts etc to complete your tax return. Great for self employees people.

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API into something like Expensify.com for the expenses items?

I’d like the “Expenses” category to be a “Tag”, in addition to that is was a “food” or “travel” category.

Also if one has marked a particular spend as “Expense” - that seems to become the defaulft for that merchant…

Recently I’ve purchased sandwiches at Pret a Manger for some customer training, and marked as “expense”.
Today’s purchase what automatically marked as “Expense” for Pret… But of course the next and future purchases at Pret aren’t ALL going to be an expense - so should revert to being “food” category.

Once Monzo’s API is ready, a Expensify.com could set up that integration.

Could you explain the benefits for you of having an expenses tag? Have you considered using an emoji in notes as a tag instead?

This applies to all categories at the moment. I assume that once a user changes a category for a merchant, they generally don’t change it back. Monzo will have the data to know whether that or the opposite is more common & I assume that setting, will be updated if your use case is more common.

Well, to me - expenses are not really a “category” of spending, but merely a flag that the payment needs to be reported and reimbursed by the company. Each expense still belongs to the appropriate category, and one hopes that applies to the category of the merchant; typically - Food & Drink, Travel, Phone, Accomodation and “other”…
Thinking longer-term - if the data associated with a purchase is to be used in APIs to create other wonderful integrations (such as with Expensify), then will an “emoji” be a consistent & reliable flag to indicate an expense (for everybody using the system)?

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I see what you’re saying. My work involves a lot of data reporting so I understand the importance of maintaining a consistent definition for a certain set of data.
Having said that, the advantage of assigning these purchases to a dedicated category is that they’re not bundled up with your personal spend. That means you don’t have to worry about the impact on targets or reporting, expenses are just excluded.
You could of course exclude anything with the expenses tag from those queries. But this is the only use case that I’m aware of for tags at the moment (sub-categories isn’t one). If they were added, Monzo would end up having to build around tags in every feature that they create. Which means we’re heading further down the path towards building a product supports business use & Tom has specifically said that Monzo won’t offer business accounts (accounts being the core Monzo product).

You’re right emoji can’t be relied on for integrations, you do need a consistent way to identify the expense transactions.

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OK, I suppose then I didn’t realise the importance of categories in this sense are to split the spends as such, not just represent the “type” of the merchant per-se (which, BTW I wonder why you cannot, by default, use the Visa / MC “TCCs” which are broad categorisations of the MCCs?)… But then I see why they should be “personally” assigned…
I can relate this to the “money” applcations used for tracking budgets etc.
But I’d still then say that changing the category for one purchase from a particular merchant may not ALWAYS want to be reflected “forward” (and may not want to become the “default” for everybody)…
I struggle with “categories” for all sorts of things like transactions, emails etc. and would further suggest that a more flexible approach like GMail using “Tags” for each item could be a more flexible approach… An item could be tagged multiple times (and this may also then mean “Work Expense” could be one tag)…
But that could I see cause problems for any budget tracking (you don’t want to “double count” anything), but on the other hand may also be a way of having “different views” on the spending… I would see those tags as having some “own” personal adaptations, but supported by a “standard” set which would represent the broadly used groups (food, travel etc.) and be the default for a particular merchant…
Maybe this is stepping “away” from a KISS approach though. It’s difficult to “see the future” until it arrives :blush:

This is a deliberate design constraint which Hugo’s explained here -

it is a compromise but I’d much rather gain the insights (i.e. your peers who purchase their groceries at Sainsburys rather than Tescos spend x% less per month on average), rather than having more specific categories, as the existing categories are detailed enough for me at the moment.
While we’re on the subject, categories are going to be reviewed in a few months, when I assume more will be added.

As I mentioned, I don’t know whether it’s better to keep the new category or revert to the original, only Monzo does.

I’d suggest we carry on that conversation here, to avoid repeating part of a conversation that may have already happened -

my question would be, once you have those views, how can you turn that insight into actions? If you can think of some examples, you have a much more compelling use case (I hope that doesn’t sound patronizing, I’m trying to help you build the use case here).

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Have a combination of categories for budgeting and tags to identify expenses. So you could split one transaction at Tesco into 2 categories, petrol and groceries, but tag one personal and one expenses so your budgeting not effected but know what you can claim back from work or what you will get refunded. Plus you need to be about to see reports on either categories or tags.

I have been saving my expenses using the tab, but when it came to trying to claim them back, there is no way to export them or save them as a pdf. This makes this feature pretty useless, in my opinion. Which is a shame because everything else Monzo has done so far has really impressed me! I asked them about this in November and they said they have no plans to add this feature at present. Please Monzo! It would be really useful if you would consider adding this!

Monzo is really intended for personal use.

You could always try an account at Coconut for your business expenses, or set up an account at Tide (as self employed not ltd co)