✅ Custom Category Creation

So it is happening then. In a month?

I’m pretty sure that the review means new / changed categories, rather than adding the option for users to be able to add their own custom categories.

Whenever I’ve said that a custom categories feature won’t be added in the foreseeable future, Hugo’s liked my post (& he doesn’t like many posts ;)).

This has probably been mentioned but it would be amazing to create your own sub categories for the preset ones. For example in holidays to have the option to group spending by specific location. So you know how much you spent in each place. In transport would be good to see how much one spends on Uber and TFL separately. In shopping grouping clothes shopping away from present shopping or things for th house etc. Anyway you get the idea.

PS. Loving Monzo (can I have a job) :grinning:

Best,
Vanya

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If you had used the search function (the magnifying glass or frying pan type logo on the menu bar) and searched for Custom Categories you will see it has been suggested about 13 times or more, so your suggestion is quite popular.

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Hey Vanya!

This is one of our most requested features, but we’re still figuring out a smart way to do it. There are a number of considerations and trade offs to think about when it comes to introducing custom categories, our head designer Hugo explains really well here

At the moment, tagging is currently the best way to group transactions in a way that is searchable :slightly_smiling_face:

Hope this helps!

Now that more people are using Monzo for their current account, the present categories are feeling a bit limited. I’d like to see Monzo expand them rapidly and hide ones I don’t use. At present I don’t use ‘Cash’ or ‘Holidays’, but misuse some other categories since you can’t add your own :man_shrugging:

Which categories would you most like to see?

  • :moneybag: Income
  • :bank: Fees (interest payments, overdraft etc, could include advice on how to avoid debt?)
  • :money_with_wings: Taxes
  • :moneybag: Savings (for withdrawals)
  • :house: Housing
  • :derelict_house: Insurance
  • :ambulance: Health (inc Fitness)
  • :postbox: Postage
  • :gift: Gifts (including Charity)
  • :child: Kids

0 voters

Any more essentials that I’ve missed?

Categories Wishlist

What I’d really like to see long term on categories from Monzo:

  • Some more categories please - there is no reason not to just add these now
  • Custom sub-categories (so that monzo can mostly ignore them in their UI and I can use them!)
  • Don’t present categories in a spending report which are not used (are 0)
  • Don’t present certain categories (Saving withdrawals for example) in a spending report at all, as the money is not spent so much as moved around to other pots elsewhere
  • Have targets for savings which reward you rather than scold for reaching them

If you hide the categories which are not used, there’s no reason not to have more of them, and the current set is really starting to feel limited now.

Sub-categories

Sub-categories would be things like Clothing or Toys under Shopping, Drinks under Entertainment, Healthcare, Medicines under Health or Investments and Premium Bonds under Saving say, but crucially users should be able to create them, and then this would relieve any pressure for new categories in future - just make your own sub-category instead. Later Monzo might even suggest some of these based on what users create, and when you go into Shopping say could present your shopping split out into different subcategories rather than just one list, but for now just let users create them please.

Any more ideas you’d like to see under the Spending tab?

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Will be interesting to see what categories people want the most.
I think @hugo made a post here highlighting changes coming to the spending tab as well as categories in the next few months, will be interesting to see what ones are included: Breakdown

Charity and investments, fo sho.

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I think these are great ideas and I’d love to see categories evolve in this direction. It would make them useful to me. One thing I would add (which may be implied already) is that it should be possible to construct a search using the sub-categories as tokens.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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.

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Some categories such as health do not exist currently, so maybe in future Monzo can add them, or customers can change
manually?

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Custom categories is a very common request here and is something that I’m sure will be revisited at some point.

I’d recommend reading this thread and searching around the community site for some good insight from the team as to what they’re thinking of doing.

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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 :slight_smile:

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 :spy:

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Hi, Some categories I would love to see:

  1. house expenses
  2. clothes ( would like to have this as separate from shopping)
  3. medical
  4. gifts
  5. own car and public transport (would like to keep these two categories separate)
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Hey,

For me rent would be a really useful category, wonder if anyone else would find this helpful? :slight_smile:

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Not Rent but Housing Costs, i.e. Mortgage and/or Rent as people may pay one or the other or both.

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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. :+1:

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