Sometimes I have some transactions that are random that I don’t want to keep in my spending records. For example I needed to pay a friend for something from my legacy account but (of course) doing so was too complicated as he was not a payee. So I transferred to monzo then transferred to friend. Now I have this amount on my monzo as a spending which I am not able to properly allocate into one of the categories. It would be useful to have a check box to say, don’t count this. Alternatively a new category called “One Off” which you can decide whether the sum should be accounted in your overall monthly spend.
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The main thing that causes this problem for me is savings - they are counted as spending, even though there should be a Savings category which doesn’t count towards Spending and which have inverse targets (which congratulate you for reaching them rather than scolding you for doing so). I think this would be best handled by having new categories which are not counted towards your spending (as they are in effect sending money to savings in pots or elsewhere like an isa).
Getting a little impatient to see categories improved in Monzo - this is something which wouldn’t require much dev time or any extra infrastructure, just some thought about how users currently use categories and which new ones could usefully be added. This is one area where the experience in tide for example is way ahead of Monzo. Currently I misuse several categories for something else (for example expenses for saving), which of course will poison the data for Monzo if they try to use it and think the categories reflect what users actually spend on, so enforcing very limited categories is having perverse outcomes which were perhaps not foreseen.
Personally I’d like to see:
- Categories which don’t count for spending (to address your point above)
- Targets for saving as well as spending (for example for saving for a car)
- Some more obvious categories which are badly needed (don’t mind which, just give us more!)
- User-defined sub-categories which Monzo can ignore and we can use to categorise properly.
I agree, the target stuff needs to be more refined. After writing my post, I decided to use the “Expenses” tab to put all these extra “un-categoriseable” payments.
This would be very useful. every so often I have a large transaction go through my account which totally messes up the budget. For example, this month i divested a number of shares, withdrew the money to my monzo account and then sent them to a savings account. now my spend for the month is totally messed up as all I really want to track is food, drink, and money spent on socialising.
I don’t think I’d like a straight up “don’t categorise” option because it has the potential to be misused.
I know a lot of people who treat themselves with say a £5 purchase of chocolate/sweets on a regular basis and wouldn’t categorise these “one offs”. At the end of the month they are left wondering where their £20-£30 went.
I’d rather be able to pair off income to an expenditure. For example, if you pay a restaurant bill and your 2 friends transfer in their third of the share, you can click on the restaurant transaction and link it to your friends’ payments. This way, the bill will still show but only with your third which is your actual spend.
Well this would solve my issue so I’m fine with it, but it’s prob more complicated than just a simple check box - and Monzo is about making banking simpler.
This is on the radar - it’s likely we’ll revisit categories when we give budgeting an overhaul for the current account. It’s less a case of dev time it’s more the discussion around the best solution and most appropriate improvements for categories as these changes will have implications on other features and areas of the app - we want to make sure we don’t have to change them again in 6 months time!
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