Been a user of Monzo for 6 years now and find the app is becoming unnecessarily complex.
I don’t understand the difference between the OG summary screen with the pie chart (which works great) and the newish target screen with the line chart (which doesn’t).
They’re two completely unrelated features that seem to allow you to do the same thing - set budgets per category and track spending. unnecessary duplication.
The target screen UX is so much worse because you can only exclude whole categories rather than individual expenses from the budget. This means that the moment you buy something that you don’t want to be included in your budget, which belongs in one of the budgeted categories, you’re screwed.
Can anyone explain the real difference between the two?
I’m worried Monzo are also thinking of deprecating the better ‘Summary’ screen as they’re moving it deeper and deeper into the app with each release.
If it aint broke don’t fix it - i’m sure there are better places to invest time than rebuilding a feature with less flexibility.
Also sad to see how hard it is to give feedback to Monzo compared to before
I can see where personal preferences creep in here. Being somewhat involved with Summary (but not budgeting per category), I do like the left-to-spend indicators - both in Summary and under the cards in the carousel. And I don’t see such a big difference between the 2 (Summary and Trends), but having used both extensively over the years, I now prefer Trends. It gives more granular control over reporting. Flicking through Balance, Spending and Target is simple and I use the burn-down graph a lot for checking what I can do until the end of the current cycle.
If something is placed into a budgeted category, and you don’t want it there, you have to remove it from that category anyway. So use a category that is not used for budgeting, or make one (if custom categories are available) and place the transaction into that category. Then exclude that category from Trends. All future ‘non-budget-spend’ items should be categorised in this way moving forward. It’s a manual process, but these will be the exception rather than the rule.
Trends is the way forward though and, unfortunately for die-hard Summary users, Summary will disappear at some point.