I’ve actually stopped using monzo to categorise transactions and rely on emma now. At the current rate of progress, emma will have sorted this whilst monzo are still farting around with tags.
But! Couldn’t I tag dog stuff with “pet” AND “dog” and cat stuff with “pet” AND “cat”? So I could search for either or.
I do agree that more and custom categories would be nice - I like the detail and sub-categories that are available on Money Dashboard - but I think tags work well with that and give you more versatility.
I found some of my transactions in Emma had tags added but I had not added tags so assume it done by their system. So I went thru them one by one editing them all to remove the tags.
Just seems like a lot of hassle to me. I’d rather just assign it all to a category
Am I cynical in thinking that Custom categories will not be implemented because it would make it harder for others (connected apps, companies etc.) to analyse spending patterns for the purpose of selling us services and stuff?
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I think you may be right, but I already abuse the categories, using what would normally be low spending categories that I don’t care about to track some pretty large transactions. Would be interesting to see how that pans out!
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Custom sub-categories would still let Monzo use the original top level categories for their stuff and we’d get to play with our own underneath. Surely everybody wins. Plus they’d get to see which of ours are most popular to know which ones to add to their own list and get even more detailed info on our spending.
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I can get how pets could be seen as family 
But I’m not sure categorising colleagues, some friends, and some or all lovers (especially for us polyamorous people) as family makes sense 
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That could still work with custom categories, though, if they just made each one a sub-category of the default ones.
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My issue with hashtags is they don’t total up automatically like the categories do, I tag everything but I don’t see much value in it (as it is currently intergrated)
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I expect (hope) that Monzo adjusts which categories are assigned to certain merchants by default based on the category that’s most commonly assigned to the merchant by users. Since Monzo can see that data, there shouldn’t be any need for users to alert Monzo themselves.
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That should work with many retailers, but with some hypermarkets like Tesco say, if 33% say shopping, 33% transport (for fuel) and 34% say groceries they may change it to groceries and piss off the other 66% of the customers 
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That’s a great example of an easy to spot / manage edge case 
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I dont think that aggregate data has much value, I misuse the majority of the categories because I can’t create my own, I tried tags but I can’t make it add them up, all I can do is search them.
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The categories section so far is very good but I personally would find a “Drinks” category very useful.
Being a Londoner I often go for beers/drinks with friends and colleagues, and as a London based company I can only assume this is a common occurrence for you, but at the moment I have to put these into the “Entertainment” category. As I leave "“Eating Out” for actual food/dinner.
I know I can ‘tag’ them but that is harder to see from the top down level on the spending tab.
Tagging is also quite labour intensive, especially if you go out on a night and order lots of drinks.
This would also be useful for coffee drinkers.
I appreciate you don’t want to overwhelm the spending tab with options but I think for British company this would fit in well with your key market and largest user group.
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At the moment I put my drinks in the Entertainment category then add a note with a beer emoji so that it’s obvious what it is and have the ability to scarily search and see how much I spend on beer.
Not a complete solution, but a hack in the mean time whilst other categories are decided on…
This is what I do too, but I really do think that a lot of people would benefit financially from a system that clearly shows things like alcohol, coffee, cigarette spend etc, as these are things a lot of people might be unaware just how much they are spending on and it could really help to do so easily.
I know, before anyone says, that there are ways of doing it. I’m talking about a super simple way like a category (or dare I say it, eventually a sub-category!)
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I use entertainment coz I entertain 
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With this, you can use the information to show things like “You’ve spent £25 on cigarettes / takeaway this week, in a year that equates to £1300.” Think I can safely say that I spend way too much money on take away, and with that visual eye opener it may make me think twice before clicking that order button.
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