✅ Custom Category Creation

I don’t use my banking app but I don’t think it offers that. I use a budgeting software YNAB (and have used other similar ones in the past) - I import my banking transactions into it.

I’ve tried tagging a few things and maybe that will be a workaround but I’m not quite clear on how it would work in terms of knowing if you’re coming up to max spend on that tag.

I’m trying to avoid using bank PLUS budgeting software (to eliminate the extra slightly tedious step!); it sounds like other people in these threads have similar reasons for wanting additional flexibility.

Fingers xd for someday… :wink:

3 Likes

And that (add a target to a tag) is exactly what I would want to do! :slight_smile:

2 Likes

I’m fairly new to YNAB, but it’s changed the way I manage my money. I don’t know if I could go back to relying on categories and not use a zero based approach. Do you think custom categories and targets added to it would move you away from YNAB?

Yep. Absolutely. Particularly because the downloading of transactions has to be done manually (as YNAB doesn’t auto-support UK banks). It’s that extra layer of steps I’m really wanting to get rid of!!!

1 Like

And split transactions or separate tags. For example, if I spent £20 at Tesco, I’d like the ability to put £10 to #Beers and another £10 to #Groceries. Not the whole £20 to either groceries, beers or both.

4 Likes

For me I’d like a charity category - so that I can see how much giving I do each month/year.

Would be great if we could create some of our own ones. For example I would love to have ‘groceries’ and then ‘the stuff I didn’t need to buy but did and put it under groceries’ basically all my twix bars and coffees. Then I can see how much I spend on rubbish and could be saving. Maybe a ‘wasted money’ category for people like me :joy:

2 Likes

Surprise winner so far - Income is top of the charts! This is an odd category as it’s almost a separate section for some people, and would definitely require user-definable sub-categories for all the different sorts of income people might have - wages, dividends, interest, rent, royalties etc.

For me personally Savings is the one I most want, along with some way to exclude that from spending, as it’s not really spending at all.

2 Likes

It would be nice to have a separate category for fitness/sport and not grouped with health (e.g. medicines, clinic fees, etc.)

4 Likes

Yes, dithered over that. Sounds like people would want a separate category for that. I’d be fine with that - as long as unused categories are not listed in breakdowns, they do no harm.

I realise this has been said many times, but the ability to assign custom categories would be great and extremely useful!

Not too impressed with Monzos insistence that their ability to collect data is more important than the users ability to customise categories.

3 Likes

Interesting to see how far ahead income is here - this is the biggest missing category from my perspective, but I’d be happy to hear anything from Monzo at all on categories and what their plans are.

I’d like to add another voice to the custom categories crowd

We want them!

Perhaps a way to make it easier for everyone is to have customised sub-categories, while keeping the parent categories the same.

I’m not happy with the way Monzo is more interested in collecting data than giving their users a good experience. Do you guys sell this data on? Is this how you make your money? No better than traditional banks if so.

2 Likes

I’d love to see a category or sub-category for Pets :cat:

2 Likes

I would love to see a fuel/petrol category and a hair & beauty category which could be used for any kind of salon appointment/visit - nails/wax/tint etc :slight_smile:

5 Likes

Good idea, I think this probably worthy of a top-level category for those who would use it.

If monzo adopted the idea of not showing categories if a user doesn’t use them, it’d be fine to have some top level ones like this which only certain people used (but those people would use them a lot).

Hoping we see some movement on this from Monzo this year, as their current set of categories and treatment of savings and income is pretty limited.

2 Likes

Definitely looking forward to seeing a “Savings” category. Targets are currently useless until I can properly categorise internal transfers.

1 Like

Yes please add customisation options.
You can’t possibly fit the entire humanity spectrum of needs in 10 boxes.
For example I feel pretty disgusted that for all my music and creative spending I have only the choice of ‘Entertainment’ and ‘General’…Duuh

Hopefully subcategories will surface at some point. I could probably work with that instead, especially if they were customizable.

1 Like

Apparently a couple of new categories are coming soon, but no custom categories :man_shrugging:

https://community.monzo.com/t/custom-categories-15-new-category-requests/7018/41

Given the number of users posting about this over a lot of different threads, I think Monzo should reassess their position from a few years ago in light of how people are using their app, and the competitive landscape (most competitors have custom categories, most accounting software allows custom categories) and consider both adding to the current categories and whether it would really be so hard to add custom categories to their UI while keeping it simple for those who have no need for them.

1 Like