I maintain a spreadsheet to track income, different bank accounts, ISAs, et al.
I’ve only just come to create a ‘Monzo’ sheet in it, but I’m having tremendous difficulty getting the numbers to match up. Now that I’ve tried everything I can think of, I thought I’d post with some suggestions for what would have made it (much) easier to get this far, and what would almost certainly solve the remaining problem.
I won’t detail why I think a web/desktop app would be superior for this, because I think we’ve already done that to death.
Extracting information
I’ve moaned a bit; then bolded a suggestion:
- ‘Spending’ is great for expenditure, but doesn’t include income. Include income in ‘spending’.
- Need to click on each category to get the pence, despite a wealth of whitespace, and that it’s styled with smaller-font pence in the next screen anyway: this results in a lot of back and forth tapping. Include pence values in ‘spending’ breakdown.
- Though I’d rather ‘Spending’ didn’t round pence off at all (see above) the view presently rounds £x.50 down to £x. Use conventional rounding.
- No other single screen for all income: searching ‘top up’ obviously doesn’t include Monzo.me payments; searching ‘+’ doesn’t include top-ups. Include top-ups (later, income) in searches for ‘+’.
- No export CSV or similar? I thought people kept talking about this, perhaps it’s iOS only? CSV export. (I’d still have to somehow move it so I could access it from a computer, but now I’m bordering on breaking my promise not to moan about web/desktop apps
) - Cannot search by sterling value. Allow searching for e.g. ‘£7.30’. (see below)
After fighting the above…
{Top-up total} +{Monzo.me in} -{Sum monthly totals} -{Monzo.me out} != {Balance}
It’s off by about £7.30, which per above, I can’t search for, but it doesn’t sound like anything particular.
The point of my post is really just the suggestions above to make this easier, but if anyone has an idea what I haven’t accounted for, that’d be great too!
Finally, before someone says ‘Monzo isn’t for you, Monzo gives you spending reports, and fancy graphs are coming, ditch your spreadsheet’ - well, I don’t want even as granular breakdown in my spreadsheet as Monzo gives us (too much typing!) - I just want monthly in/out, and to break bills & groceries out of outgoings too, as a sort of rough ‘minimum spend’ that I can project forward.
Cheers,