Display running balance with each entry

Thatā€™s an opinion Iā€™ve not heard before. Personally Iā€™ve been waiting for it to come to Android for months.

Perhaps Monzo would consider a setting to turn it on it off.

Itā€™s about to become really relevant so it shouldnā€™t really be a matter of preference but us getting to something that everybody can use and enjoy. Which clearly we havenā€™t achieved 100% yet :slight_smile:

Hi,

Just to add my 2 cents to the discussion.
I have experienced in different occasions the following:

  • A transaction failed at the POS
  • It somehow actually went through
  • It did not show up in the feed (until a forced sync was issued/I did a logout/login/clear data/black magic)
  • The balance updated within the app
  • The ā€œspent todayā€ numbers were off (in case I got a refund and I still had the transaction missing within the feed)

Also this morning - as a result of the above scenario - I had a balance of Ā£28.something; before leaving the house I topped up by Ā£30, but the balance came out as Ā£48.something.

A running balance adjacent to each entry in the feed or a ā€œprevious balance: X/NewBalance: Yā€ within the details of a transaction would help spot this kind of errors (the latter would force me to tap in and out of transaction details though).

Arguments like that I do not need to worry about checking this kind of things, that errors should be apparent and/or I should keep an eye on the balance are fallacious.

I - for instance - do not check the balance every single time before I use the card and for sure I cannot remember what the balance was at a certain point in time.

Thatā€™s exactly why bank statements have 3 columns: in, out, balance so that you can spot discrepancies at a glance without running the whole thing through excel.

If Monzo want also to implement predictive graphs and other frills, I am OK with it, but I need to be able to spot when items are missing from the feed and a running balance could reduce the math needed to a single addition/subtraction.

A graph telling me what balance I have in jumps of 24 hours lacks the granularity I need.

Apologies about the rant. :wink:

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Totally agree with you. I had an issue yesterday where balance right but one transaction missing from feed. I have no confidence in using a bank as my main account until a proper running balance is shown so I can audit my account.

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Since an image is worth 1000 words, if at any stage I see that the balance from the previous transaction ā€œjumpsā€ in a way that is not consistent with the next transaction in the feed, I will be able to spot an issue no matter when it happened.

If everything is OK, the last running balance besided the last transaction will match the balance in the upper left corner.

Easy to understand, difficult to miss.

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Thanks for that suggestion. That exact solution is on the roadmap for current accounts :slight_smile:

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It would be great if the implementation were like the message time stamp in iMessage - not visible unless you drag a message to the left then all message timestamps are visible.

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Thatā€™s a little concerning - purely because it looks so messy. I donā€™t feel the need to self audit via a running balance. However a swipe/pull to see more would be interesting addition.

Any idea how you envisage this looking @hugo?

I can give a bit more of info. There are a few reasons why we donā€™t want to do thatā€¦

  1. We want to reserve swipe to left for future quick actions around a feed item.
  2. Ideally we donā€™t like hiding stuff away that only power-users can discover.
  3. We donā€™t want balances on the right side of the feed because they mess (aka cognitive friction) with the transaction amounts. Thatā€™s why the app usually displays balances (card balance, available targets, etc.) on the left side and expenditure (spent today, target used, etc.) on the right one.

At the end all this is a game of trade-offs, nothing is ā€œfreeā€ and adding this kind of patterns to add one feature would potentially make the app worse overall. Hope it makes sense :slight_smile:

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Youā€¦

It is a shame in this community you can only :heart: posts and not thumbs down.

Some of us really want a running balance, and personally I retype every debit and credit transaction into a spreadsheet to double check the balance as I canā€™t trust a balance without a running balance for verification purposes

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Well, you have a running balance + spent today on top of the screen so that should give you the same info. But yeah, I appreciate you might need something that weā€™re not providing right now, I hope by the time we add the balance before and after the transaction (on the transaction detail screen) that becomes less of a problem for you :slight_smile:

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I can see what you are saying about the app layout. But I really think some way to view a list of transactions along with a running balance is a must. Perhaps you could provide a feature to export the transactions as a spreadsheet?

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  1. We donā€™t want balances on the right side of the feed because they mess (aka cognitive friction) with the transaction amounts.

And yet any ā€œidiotā€ can overcome this ā€œcognitive frictionā€ TfL use to show what is going on when they travelā€¦

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So you think that looks like a clean, simple, modern user interface - like the rest of the appā€™s design?

Thereā€™s a lot more room on a desktop size screen than there is on a mobileā€¦

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Canā€™t wait to join the current account bunch!! :slight_smile:
This feature will be brilliant, Natwest offer this and itā€™s incredibly useful - Nationwide donā€™t and it really irks me haha :wink:

I think that adding a ā€œBalanceā€ column (and possibly ā€œcharge/balanceā€ column headings)is not going to kill usability and/or confuse people as Monzo implied for months in the forum and through support.

Also - of course - there is no need to add Date and Time columns in the app, the way the timeline is shown currently works just fine.

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I always find ability to choose which columns I would like to use a very important and often forgotten option in any UIā€¦ Just give people option to show/hide it. Those who donā€™t mind a bit of cognitive friction will be happy and those who donā€™t like too many things on their screen wonā€™t complain eitherā€¦

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Monzo is going to give you access to this information btw, just not in the main feed -

Nationwide have just implemented this on their mobile app with the update today, with the balance shown beneath the transaction value:
(hereā€™s their iTunes preview image)

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You beat me to it!! :wink:

They just launched this on android too. Along with fingerprint login!! :grinning: Yay

Maybe if I say Monzo donā€™t have it yetā€¦ Itā€™ll be released in the next update :wink: haha

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