I would advocate for an “advanced” screen with all the info for us powerusers. Ie. when transaction was authorised and when it was presented plus all the meta data… Just interesting. Now that would be confusing if everyone saw it by default!
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Hi all!
So, I’ve been away on a travelling trip in USA for the past 10 weeks and have used Monzo every single day whilst I’ve been here. 95% have been card transactions, with just a few withdrawals for petty cash!
It’s been an absolute breeze. It’s made my trip so much simpler ( and cheaper! )
However, I find the fact that there is only your current balance at the top of the page so frustrating that it’s starting to bug me now. Any people who know the USA well will know this following scenario…
You go out for dinner, you ask for the bill, they swipe your card for the bill amount and then then give you a receipt, for you to then add a gratiuity if you wish… so I’ll use this for an example;
Bill cost - $24.75. That is then a pending transaction on your account (which is taken from your balance instantly even though they are technically just holding that amount against your card)
You add a gratiuity of $5.25. (Nice round total!) This is not taken from your balance because they are yet to charge your card.
A few days later the orginal transaction then updates from $24.75 to $30.00 and so does your balance.
However, by the time this does occur its after, say, another 10-15 transactions and a few scrolls down the page on the app and more annoyingly, normally forgotten about!
Because of this I find myself logging into the app and seeing my balance change as I log in, but I have no idea what for, because I haven’t made a transaction, if that makes sense? It happens fast, so I can’t actually see if my balance has gone up or down, so I have no idea what it could possibly be related to!
Another scenario is receiving deposits back that are held against your card at hotels. Yes I can see the transaction amount in green with the + sign, but I can’t remember what my exact balance is all the time to see if the money has actually been credited or not!
I’ve also had a lot of issues with actually totalling up transactions and getting them to actually match my balance, sometimes my balance seems to be too high and other times it’s shows less than it seems it should be!
I feel that after every transaction is made, next to the amount of said transaction, should be a current running balance, as well as maybe an overall balance amount at the top like there is now. This would solve all the above issues!
Maybe it’s just me being used to that from my other bank accounts, but for a person who is quite a*al about keeping on top of payments and balances, I find it very very annoying that I can’t see my balance in this way.
I’ve made the best part of 12k worth of transactions in these 10 weeks and that is the only complaint I have and one that, I feel is very simple to implement and a lot of other users would also appreciate it!
I’d appreciate other people’s feedback on this!
Thanks for reading!
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Hi there! 
This has been discussed quite a lot over in this thread:
And that’s Monzo’s response so far - I agree with what you’re saying, having a running balance would be very nice, similar to other banks! Maybe Monzo will change their mind at some point / find an inventive new way to display it 
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Well I guess I’ll go back to using my other bank when I’m in the UK then.
Thanks for clearing that up!
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So I can see my running balance?
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An alternative would be more information about the difference between the initial authorisation and the final amount. Particularly with currency exchange transactions this would be useful when the exchange rate changes. The examples you give are also a good use case. I’d envision this to be shown in the transaction detail, and would help to show find out why things have changed amount.
Highlighting on the main list the transactions which haven’t settled in some way would be useful.
I can’t believe this is still being debated! I just had a bill payment bounce because there was no money in my account. I have no way of checking when my account went in to the red because there’s no running total (including the API for the current account).
Only way I figured it out was by pulling all the data from the API and aggregating everything. Turns out a system glitch on the Monzo side caused a top up to remove £200 from my account in error. Customer support refunded it. If the bill hadn’t bounced I would have probably assumed I just overspent this month.
You can’t say your app is in beta in one breath and tell us to trust that you won’t make mistakes in the next!
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Could you elaborate on this a bit further? Interested to understand what broke!
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I transferred £200 from another account. It was put in a Monzo holding account, but rejected because of a system glitch. It was 1am on a Sunday, so maybe system maintenance or something. The refund was taken from my account, but the money was left in the holding account. The direct debit bounced the next day. I’m assuming they would have caught it later that day, but it means I have to call the company and make sure it doesn’t affect my credit rating.
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I still think a running balance would be better as it’s in the right context. Though not on every transaction but every date line for that day.
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On the home page or even on the description page of a transaction it would be good to know what the balance was before or after the transaction. My Nationwide account has this which was pretty handy.
It’s a good idea and has been raised and is being looked at although it is likely it will be a layer down.
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I am now using N26 for my Euro use… Its inferior to Monzo in many many ways. However they seem to have cracked this issue fairly neatly.
You have the spending timeline, same as monzo, with balances at the top. However as soon as you scroll back through the timeline the ‘running balance’ changes to the balance of that transaction. Its a neat simple way, that fits in with the current design, gives the added feature, and doesnt clutter or change negatively the UI.
Barclays banking app breaks down each day in the timeline and shows what your account balance is at the end of each day. It’s surprisingly useful to track things like refunds and payments in. Also, it’s fine to show that you’ve spent X today, but in a week’s time that becomes harder to track.
Even as a slight design alteration to the current Monzo app, just put the ending balance next to the date?
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Would it be possible to add the above to the app?
I recently moved my current account to B (Clydesdale/Yorkshire) because they bribed me with £250.
There is no running balance in the app. There’s current balance and available balance (though they always seem to be exactly the same as each other).
Transactions enter and leave the account and all you have is a fluctuating overall balance.
The other day, a DDM was requested by the originator, the balance dipped, other stuff on the account happened and the balance went up. …but I didn’t see this and there was no notification, by any means, that B bounced the DDM.
I telephoned them (they are good on customer service) and explained the situation. The chap on the phone said that other customers had given similar feedback about the app; customers are confused as to where that are with their money.
I’d suggest the job of the user interface is to make it easy for the customer to understand. I’ve not used Monzo in earnest, yet. I don’t think it is ready. My view is a running balance is a good thing and an essential piece of information to be conveying to customers.
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This is definitely needed somewhere. If a high-value foreign currency transaction settles for a higher amount than anticipated in GBP, a transaction value shifts or something similar happens, then as mentioned elsewhere in this thread you open up the app to see your balance shift up/down/sideways and have no idea why.
With the regular high street banks, this is standard functionality. I understand Monzo hasn’t been around for decades but if you can’t easily work through the not-uncommon ‘I had £72 yesterday and £15 today, what happened?’ scenario without guesswork then as much as we fundamentally know computers don’t mistakes it’s difficult to have full faith in the account.
Perhaps allowing some kind of traditional statement view with a pure ‘this happened in this exact order and this how much money was involved at each stage’ could be accessible somewhere? If not, I sure hope it’s planned!
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I haven’t contributed to this thread before because I hadn’t any strong feelings until now. But recently I had to help administer a bank account where what was most important was reporting the balance on a particular day. In part this was because on day+3 days and day+6 days, money was incorrectly transferred to this account (the sender meant to transfer them to a different account entirely).
If I’d only had current balance to go by, I would’ve had to manually calculate what the balance was on said particular day. This would’ve been rather a waste of my time, and also introduced the possibilty of user error. With a running balance, I could see - straight away - at a glance what the balance was on the day I needed to record it.
As a result, I’m now fully converted to the view that I would like to see Monzo report my running balance if necessary. Even if the standard view is current balance, I’d like to be able to make the app show me a running balance; or, at a minimum, be able to download ‘official’ monthly statements showing transactions and running balances in full.
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Am i missing something? My app tells me the balance and the spent at the end of each day I scroll to. Maybe android is different?
Android is of course different…they don’t have that feature