I would argue gifts such as to family are different from charity which you would want to declare on your annual self assessment to HMRC and hence need a separate category.
As for health and fitness, I feel health costs such as prescriptions or glasses are distinct from gym or sports centre memberships, and in England where prescriptions are not free (unlike Wales/Cymru and Scotland/Alba) having a separate category will enable easy calculation of if it cheaper to have a Pre Payment Certificate or not.
Yes sure, I started with Charity here, then changed it to Gifts after looking at what others had suggested. Taxonomies are hard, but I think the solution is to define some top level categories as Monzo have done (with just a few more please), then have a bunch of far less structured user-editable categories beneath them. So I was imagining Gifts would have subcategories of Charity, Christmas, or whatever else users prefer - probably mostly specific to the user.
I would personally not be inclined to lump together Health and Fitness, but wasn’t sure if Fitness really warrants a top level category - perhaps it does.
I personally feel that custom categories would be far more useful to people than pre-determined categories. Categories that may apply to the way I’d like to manage my spending are likely to be different to a lot of people, making my own spending categories would be ace. Considering how many in the community have opposing views on how they like or dislike certain ideas, allowing all users to make their own customisations seems to me to be the way to please everyone - not sure how feasible this would be but I would certainly love this.
Also agree we should be able to hide categories or rename categories that don’t currently suit me. But I would generally say the existing categories are limited and sub-categories would definitely be a nice touch.
There also needs to be a category that allows me to exclude a certain transaction from the feed, or an on/off switch for a category for you to choose if you want it to contribute to your spending totals (I know this has been mentioned in various other threads but wanted to repeat as it is one of my most desired features)
I agree custom categories really are a must. There are lots of possibilities but since Monzo seem attached to shared categories at the top level (so they can aggregate and reliably present data presumably), subcategories which are use-editable seems the obvious solution. This area doesn’t need a massive overhaul, it just needs nicer defaults and a few more choices for users as you outline. I think an on/off switch would be fine for categories to show in spending - that would cover transactions too as you could just make sure any transactions were labelled as that.
I’m hoping “We’ll update the Spending section” means they’ll look at how they present categories there again, and ideally add user-editable ones and ways of controlling which categories are shown. Hopefully if they keep listening to users on this they’ll get there eventually, though it may take years to get this spending section working for everyone.
When we do get itemised receipts for almost everything (I’m sure this will come one day), they’ll need to look again of course and it could go down to the level of individual products, and push products from the same transaction into different categories, but that’s a way off for now. It would be nice eventually to say I spent 300 on coffee this year though - it would make that sort of spending far more concrete.
Following on from Richard’s comment, the categories are due to be reviewed any minute now & I expect more will be added so if there are other categories that you need, along with Health, now’s the time to mention them
All of the discussion about custom categories so far has a title Custom Categories x so just search for that phrase & you’ll find them
This will be useful once we launch current accounts and people can start getting paid directly into their Monzo accounts. We’ll probably take another look at categories at that stage.
Would be really good to have ability to add custom categories. I use my bike for getting around and would like to add anything I buy for it into its own categories - at the moment anything that I buy from a cycle shop goes under “transport” along with TFL and rail tickets
