✅ Custom Category Creation

Perhaps Insurance could be Insurance/Assurance as I would lump Life Assurance in with Life Insurance, Motor Insurance, Travel Ins etc…

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Hi, I am a new user (1 week) and found that the ability to rename/peronalise the existing short list of categories is the only enhancement i have needed so far.
Great product and approach.
I look forward to checking out the travel features next week😎

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Distinguishing drinking (at a bar/pub/club) as a separate category from entertainment which feels more related to spending money on fun events. Very useful for me but I bet a lot of people would like some insight into how much money they spend on alcohol each month

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I signed up to Monzo as I thought it would be great for travelling (tick) and my being self employed and keeping recipets etc but see there are only a few catagories (though i love the rest of the setup)… Could there not a ‘simple’ and ‘advanced’ option as there are for many andriod phones etc or even two versions of the app / an add on. Then people who wish to keep it simple wont have to worry. In the future you could add more options eg for VAT registered people who would need that organised too.
THANKS (preferably before 5th April)

I doubt they will add options for VAT as they providing personal accounts rather than business. Other new entrants like Tide are aimed at self employed and small businesses and do invoicing etc.

I agree. Having ‘coffee’ or ‘treat’ is very different from eating out.

You must have an option to create new personal spending categories that you can assign to payments. Totally disappointed that this is not possible! I took it read this would be the case.

This is a popular request but there’s actually a very good reason why users don’t have this option, which Hugo explains earlier in this topic here.

Having said that, Monzo are looking for ways to enable users to break down their spend into more specific categories.
The categories themselves are being reviewed after the current accounts launch.
My guess is that sub-categories might be the solution but I know that as recently as a couple of months ago, the team hadn’t decided exactly what else to do to address this here.

In the meantime, you can add emoji to notes in order to track your spend in some instances.

To be honest this was the reason for getting the card… Not really sure
why you can’t assign payments to personally created categories and the app
learn to add payments to these. Very disappointing

New user here, my two-piece:

Greater variety of categories (or, better, sub-categories) is a must for me.

The major USP of Monzo for me seems to be instant info on what you spend. This means that the most useful thing the app can do is track your spending in real time. For this to be useful, you have to be able to have good information on your spending.

At the moment, the categories are just not useful enough. Let me put it this way: the easiest part of spending to control is discretionary spending (my bills, rent, groceries are less likely to change). Most of my discretionary spending seems to fall into the ‘eating out’ category. But at the moment, I have no way of knowing at a glance whether this is because I spend too much on coffee, too much at the pub, too much out at dinner, too much on lunch when im at work, etc.

You guys have a great app and i understand you have bigger priorities right now - I also love that the app can auto-recognise the categories that it can. But for me the vision of the app is unrealised if it cannot give me good data (and then good analytics) on my spending. This requires better categories.

Thanks!

P.s. I think custom categories is a dead-end for all the reasons given above. Harder/impossible to auto-categorise them, and if I’m honest I think your average user will not really get into them if the default categories are good enough. Lots of the use cases described here (people moving from massive excel spreadsheets onto Monzo) don’t sound particularly relevant to the average user.

This doesn’t work in all cases but have you thought about adding an emoji to your transaction’s notes for each of those category’s purchases? I add a :beer: to my transactions whenever I’m on a night out, to see how often I’ve had nights out & how much I’ve spent (using the search feature to check the totals which is due to be released for Android :soon:). Assuming that when you buy your lunch, that’s all you buy (not toiletries too, from Boots, for example), then perhaps that’ll work for you too?

I wouldn’t count on categories being added for purchases at certain times of the day. That’s a different definition for the feature than what’s in place already & Monzo did try it when they were just getting started before dropping that functionality…

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Before introducing more categories to the app, I feel that it would make more sense for us to make tagging transactions easier and simpler to summarise into something meaningful for each user. The search feature Alex mentioned is a step in the right direction. I think Hugo’s concerns regarding the value we could lose (in terms of insight from aggregate data) by allowing custom categories are completely valid, but that’s not to say that we’re not still trying to work out a smart compromise for this popular request :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thanks Alex, ill give that a try and see what happens.

It is a bit of a workaround, and does exclude the possibility of using the budgeting feature to help me control different types of purchases (were the budgeting feature added to the sub-categories). Also i don’t think I can see totals for the things I tag with emojies.

Maybe official support for tagging purchases might help with seeing totals, but it’s harder to see how tags would help with the budgeting feature.

Thanks both for the comments - interesting to see such a community around this!

Jacob

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Yes it does unfortunately.

Here’s what that looks like, if you’re an iOS user - the totals are displayed at the bottom of the search results -

Ah! My bad. I missed that as my keyboard was covering the total (which may actually suggest the placement of the total should change).

Maybe that needs one further bit of analytics to make it useful (I.e. more or less than usual for a given period). Or distinguish between overall total and monthly total.

Thanks again!

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You can apply the search filters to your searches (although you can’t set criteria to exclude certain transactions), to change which transactions are included in your totals.

The filters aren’t perfect but Monzo’s planning to enhance them at some point, here’s a preview of what that’ll look like.

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I disagree. I, myself, signed up because of the app which helps (or it would at some point, ideally) stick on a budget. Plus, this is currently a prepaid card.

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So, accepting (reluctantly) that completely custom categories aren’t coming, some thoughts for the promised rethink once current accounts are go!

The cats you’ve got are very ‘young people living in London’ :wink:. When me and the wife were DINKYs (living in Watford then so close enough) eating out was a major category, with three kids six and under we actively avoid eating out if we can! A kids category would be good as somewhere to put their clothes, ballet, tumble tots, school trips,pocket money etc.

This is just a ‘for example’ off the top of my head, I’m sure there are other things!

On a slightly different point, comparisons like ‘you spend 20% more than avg on x’ is no help if some people put broadband and tv package in bills while others see it as entertainment and categorise accordingly. Perhaps tv license feels like bills but what about Netflix?

Just thinking out loud!

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I don’t know if this has already been mentioned, I think being able to set custom names and values for the targets would be good. Mainly because it would assist me in working exactly how much is going out :slight_smile: and to where.

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Just to explain - the targets are built on the categories so I’ve moved your post here.

This would be really useful in theory but it would cause some issues later on, which Hugo’s described towards the beginning of this topic.

I know Monzo are trying to decide on an alternative solution to help with this use case & some of the different options have been discussed in this topic, along with other Custom Categories topics. Hopefully they’ll implement something soon! :slight_smile:

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