Simple according to who?
It’s in the pipeline apparently
Stuck behind the Plus fatberg?
Is it still in the pipeline though 
I hope so 
Revolut has just introduced custom category creation. User can create custom name and also set a custom icon (chosen from pre-difined list though) and icon color. Hopefuly, Monzo will do the same.
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Ohhhh thats interesting.
Hopefully will mean its timeline will be ramped up a little bit more at monzo
Hi, would like to add my voice to the list requesting this improvement - I could really do with a half-dozen or so user-definable categories, so I can separate out - for example in my case - charity, work expenses, personal purchases, plus a couple of other. We moved our joint account to Monzo because it seemed to offer the opportunity to better categorise our spending, but it only works for the 50% of spending that we can correctly allocate!
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It’s so obvious that this is required to do the job properly. I suspect this may be being saved for a paid for option.
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Revolut have this now apparently for free…
Personally, dont think this is something Monzo could or should charge for.
It would be one of those features that encourage people to go full monzo and have the bulk of their spending in monzo so they would make the money back from it easily
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For those of you that want custom categories. Looks like a new one was recently added.
One step closer…
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Can’t wait for this! Would make me use budget
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At least for me, this is exactly what I want. I don’t even need all of my transactions categorised, only the ones I care about. And I’m happy to manually categorise or just tell Monzo that this arbitary set of retailers should map to this custom category.
And what I care about will change over time. For instance, last year I had this thing about wanting to change where I bought most of my groceries from. So I would’ve wanted 2 categories (shops I want to go to less, shops I want to go to more) so that I could compare the two. This would’ve helped me achieve an actual real life goal that I had, whereas the categories as they exist are meaningless to me.
I’ve never had a goal like “spend less on travel”, because for a lot of the existing categories I spend what I have to.
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I agree so much - the power of the customisation is that it can help drive actionable change
I have a bit of a habit of spending more of my fun money on Coffee than I should. If I bucket that into the general category of Eating Out - the two are mixed together and I can’t track either very effectively. If I want to spend £40 on Coffee in a month, and lets say because it’s coming up to Christmas, £200 on eating out…
By the time I’ve lumped the £240 together, and I’ve spent £180 on coffee, I can’t then afford to do the planned spending I had for That Nice Meal Out.
This is why Custom categories, and sub categories are important - it makes the info actionable.
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Nice to see this thread still alive.
A random idea just popped into my head (looking at a post that someone commented on that @hugo wrote a few years ago mind you!) would be around the idea that categories are really only useful to people who are actively using them to achieve something.
As per the last two responses above. Is one step towards custom categories to simple leave the NUMBER of categories as it is, but let us rename/icon them?
I don’t use ‘Travel’ as my bus pass is a fixed monthly price, so let me use that for ‘Lunch’…
Then you don’t really have to change too much in the current implementation, as the number isn’t changing, and the reporting still works, so even the budgetting would work (presuming the label change is passed through to there as well)?
Just a thought.
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I think that takes the aggregation side of things out of it though for monzo which might be harder to sell.
I’ve always thought sub-categories was the way to go with this… it enables the use case to be fixed without breaking that upper aggregation logic for monzo
For example you could create a “coffee” one from Eating Out or “Lunch” from Eating Out and it would work both for you and monzo.
Personally, Id love to make a “Dates” one or “Pints” one from Entertainment.
Has anyone used the Revolut way of doing this yet? I dont have revolut so if some kind soul could share this it would be great
Sorry, when I said ‘let me use that for…’ I really meant, let me rename it so I can use it for something else.
And aggregation wise the label shouldn’t matter, unless they’ve coded to the label and not an ID…!! 
It’s to do with the stats they can get from it. For instance, they want to be able to say “you spend more than the average person on eating out” or something along those lines, which is no good at all if half the people have renamed that category to “Gym” or something.
I don’t really agree with the argument because to me
- Useable categories are more important. I feel like most users must have at least one edge case that doesn’t fit the categories provided, or one additional need that could be better met.
- Because of the above, the data would not be that useful anyway. So I can see that people spend more on eating out than me… But I don’t know if they count coffee as eating out or not. I don’t know if they count food at the cinema as eating out or entertainment. I don’t know if they count a takeaway as eating out or groceries. Etc etc. So the data becomes much less useful.
I’m not interested in that data anyway tbh, but if others are I think the above would be a barrier to it being useful.
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Ahhh! Makes perfect sense, thanks!
And yes I’m with you. I want to see a better view of what I spend, I don’t really care if that’s more or less than the average of every other Monzo user (or the UK population or whatever). Every situation is different etc.
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I’m sure there are also more nuanced uses for that sort of data that I haven’t thought of, so not to poo poo the idea entirely! I’m just a person who’s very focussed on my own spending.
I guess things like what others spend on utilities might be somewhat more helpful, to alert you if you are overpaying, but I don’t see how categories in their current state would help with that.
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There are plenty of specialised ways of looking at things like utilities so, whilst it may be the long term view that the current categories were built with (if you look at them as big levers of data that Monzo could use in discussions with future partners they start to make some sense) I’m with you.
Monzo is supposed to help ME manage MY money better, right now categories is failing in that simple goal.
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This is my take on it too - it’s been said, I think by Monzo a few times, that the reason for fixed catoegires is the stats and trending - but to me that isn’t making ‘money work for everyone’, that’s making ‘my spending work for monzo’.
And yet still in the time since I first saw that comment about analtyics and trends, nothing has come from it.
Personally I see the value is much more heavily stacked for customisable categories (that I can make as actionable as I need) - which I will interact with day to day, than perhaps a monthly “Hey, you spend £x more on Transport than the average 25-50 year old in the W1 postcode area!” - cool. How do I make that useful and action worthy?
Vs, for the last 6 month’s I can see an increase in the amount of “Beard Care” spending I have done, better balance that out a bit.
And in any case, if Monzo did want to make inferences from the data set, I would think with retailer names and Mastercards MCC codes, they can already do a good job of that without categorisation.
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