Hi all,
It would great if we were able to see a running balance alongside each entry in the app. This would mirror a traditional bank invoice as you might expect.
Minor feature I know but I would really appreciate it!
Thanks
Tom
26 Likes
It is not a minor feature. Currently I regard it as a major omission.
22 Likes
Sounds a great feature that should be implemented ASAP.
6 Likes
Out if Interest, how would you use this?
Obviously your current balance is always available in the app so Iām not sure how I could use a running balance, for my older transactions 
I was coming here to post exactly thisā¦ Great timing !!
How can you not have a running balance, or at least the ability to enter into a top up and see how much it balanced to after the top upā¦ And still have any form of accuracy.
I have a ATM refund thats appeared, without any associated ATM withdrawalā¦ I am told via chat āyeah thats a refund but we have a bugā¦ it will be fixedā oddly tho that says the refunds are not showingā¦ But I am the opposite, I have the deduction not showing and the refund showing.
Either way, without some kind of running balance, at some stage a record of totals, its not possible to see the accuracy of your withdrawals. Ideally each transaction should show the balance at time of the transaction (in the details page is ok).
Without it its impossible to see the accuracy of your expenditureā¦ its just āa bunch of top ups and a bunch of expenditureā with no starting or finishing level.
6 Likes
So over a few weeksā¦ you add top upsā¦ You spendā¦ you ad more top upsā¦ all varying amounts from 50 to 500ā¦ You spendā¦
Now how do you reconcile the 2 ?? If you have no starting point, only the end point (current balance) how do you double check (double entry) the expenditure is accurately matching the inputsā¦ Theres no baseline / check point.
Seems a huge omission now I cant tally up my feedā¦
4 Likes
I see what you mean, reconciliation would be tricky. So whatās your concern here, that Monzo isnāt managing reconciliation properly for you or something else?
Also, doesnāt the pulse graph do a pretty good (perhaps not perfect) job of displaying your balance after top ups & purchases, by day?
Actually I believe my totals to be wrongā¦ in my favorā¦ But I have no actual way to be ācertainā of thisā¦ Only fairly sure.
And we have no pulse graph on Androidā¦
Got it 
so interestingly, the API does keep a running total of your balance, after each debit / credit.
Bear in mind that the amounts from the API donāt include decimal pointsā¦
Monzoās just decided not to display that figure in the app. I think Hugo touches on the reason for this here -
Anyway, itās simple to view your transactions from the API. Just go to Monzo for Developers, click the List Transactions link & hit the Send buttonā¦
Once youāve checked that the balance is consistently correct (Iām guessing it is, as Iād have thought this would have been picked up sooner, if there were issues here), itās worth flagging anything thatās causing confusion (& making it hard to keep track of your running balance), in case thereās anything that Monzo can do to make this data easier to understand 
Having said that, I trust Monzo to calculate an accurate balance for me (itās just additions & subtractions, at the end of the day) so I wouldnāt want to see the running total in my feed view because for me, it would just be noise - with no practical applicationā¦
2 Likes
I am struggling to dig through all the different declines and FX amounts to the ones in the feedā¦ But my feed doesnt seem rightā¦
ātrust without verificationā cant work in bankingā¦ It has to have that data (can be hidden to the details page) but without it theres simply no user facing way to be sure.
1 Like
Okā¦the dataās there though, Monzoās not trying to hide anything.
So if itās too much effort for you to scan the transaction data to get to the account balances (ctrl + f in Chrome will make your life easier), then frankly, that seems like a good indicator of how concerned you are about this potential issue.
The point isā¦ Thats not a user facing UIā¦
99.99% sureā¦ My feed (Home/timeline) and my Spending (monthly) dont show correct numbers.
The reason for this appears to be a displayed refund and a non displayed deduction. But that effectively screws all the visible user data. The ācurrent totalā may be correct but all data derived from the transaction data isnt.
Hence my argument that totals are an essential part of user verification.
1 Like
There certainly are a few issues with refunds & how they feed into totals at the momentā¦
1 Like
OK so its an issueā¦ Fair enough this is betaā¦ But you have to see why it then MUST have a total (somewhereā¦ Buriedā¦ Details page all ok).
On android I have only a timelineā¦ and spendingā¦ Those are now both wrongā¦ I have no other ānot wrongā data to use. Every piece of user facing UI (totals) data is incorrect, my timeline, my monthly totals, and thats ALL Monzo gives me.
If I wasnt watching Monzo with a keen eye I wouldnt knowā¦ And the lack of seeing any running balance means I would have no way to knowā¦ I get that āyou turst monzoā but this isnt a trust thing, its kind of a fundamental part of monitoring the accuracy of a beta app and system.
1 Like
Whatās wrong with those figures?
The way I see this is youāre asking Monzo to build a feature that wonāt be useful once the issues are fixed.
Perhaps this would be useful now for manual reconciliation but Iām happy to trust Monzo to do the calculations & my reporting hasnāt been impacted significantly (though perhaps there are other userās whose reporting has been though, I donāt knowā¦) so I donāt need this feature.
Anyway, I think Iāve made my point now & I donāt want this to turn into an argument so all I can say is, the more detail you can provide about where the calculations arenāt working, the better (hence my question earlier in the post) & perhaps that will add up to a strong enough use case for this feature to be implementedā¦
The issue isā¦ Without that being shown, theres no way (outside the API) to actually verify that any totals are correct, that inputs and outputs matchā¦ ātrustā is not good enoughā¦ Trust but verify.
Whats happened to me is an ATM took 100 and refunded 100ā¦ The refund is shown the deduction is hidden. Now my timeline is +100 and my spending is -100 and essentially every user facing total is incorrect. I only know its incorrect with mental arithmetic, not having the card a long time, and being sure of what I topped up and going back over the time since getting the card. Imagine a year down the road, topping up from many different debit cards !!!
In fact even as I write this I realizeā¦ Theres āspendingā as a category but not matched āfundingā categoryā¦ So again we simply cant see what we added to the account (in total).
Denying a balance / freeze point is simply non viable IMO. There āhasā to be some kind of point you can go back to and track spending totals (especially as mine are all wrong) manually against the apps version.
5 Likes
Yep. I have never trusted banks totally as people can make errors and so can computer systems. I have always audited my account from day one using a running balance and then I always know what date I had last audited it and then just have to check recent transactions. With no running balance in Monzo I can only audit from day 1 to date, which clearly ia going to become harder the longer I hold the account.
If not all people want or need such info, perhaps we could have a setting to toggle it on and off?
7 Likes
Wow well this has blown up considerably.
I believe the main reason people want this feature is for their own personal auditing.
Itās nice to see what your balance was before you spent a whole lot of X on that Y. And if anything, showing that Monzoās calculations of balance are indeed correct (which Iām sure are 99% of the time) only does good things for you guys. Yes, i could sit there and calculate it all myself but who has time to be a part-time accountant?
Thanks for all the interest guys, really excited for Monzo to go public!
Thanks
Tom
3 Likes
I discussed similar concerns way back in may here -
now we can export our data into a spread sheet is this problem of reconciliation not sorted out albeit from a laptop - should it not be immediately available in app ?
having to scroll through the graph as @hugo suggest in the attached post does seem quite cumbersome / awkward for an otherwise beautiful design
I agree that a running total on each transaction in the app is an essential feature for any bank. At the moment I have a spreadsheet that gives me a running total puled from the API, but that really isnāt going to be acceptable for the average user in the long term.
Perhaps this issue is solved by the pulse graph, but I havenāt seen the graph so I donāt know how much detail you get. Also, I donāt think that all users have the ability to export transactions to a spreadsheet yet? Feel free to correct me if Iāve missed something.
3 Likes