Email Receipts in Monzo

If you want to talk about specific issues then please DM me and I can help you get it fixed. but in respect to the most recent Amazon order, it failed because it was a plain-text Amazon format which isn’t (currently) supported.

You can change your preferences about which type of Amazon email you get in the account settings on Amazon. We may look to support these plain-text formats in the future though.


Worth noting that (since records began, 4 days ago) each day has gotten better and better in terms of success rate. (This is mostly down to people using the new engine detailed above).

I love this - so much :smile:. I’ll be setting up some auto forward rules in the next couple of days. Really helps remind me what I actually spent money on.

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Here’s the link to get nice html Amazon emails instead of plain text.

Scroll to email preferences -> general settings.

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Just taken a look and it’s trivial to support plain-text too, will get that sorted tomorrow :ok_hand:

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That’s great - thank you!

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I’ve been a little bit quiet, but what’s been happening?

I spent some time refining some of our existing merchants especially PayPal and Amazon but also some of the others too. I fixed issues with surge pricing on Uber, restaurant names on AtHand and Deliveroo, added support for a real edge case with gift cards, and solved a weird formatting problem with some Domino’s orders.

I’ve added initial support for plain-text Amazon orders.

I’ve added support for feed items for email forwarding confirmation codes. This was after feedback that it was hard to find within the account page and people expected it in their feed. (Both are now supported)

I’ve re-added support for success and failure feed items to the new ingest, finally closing the gap between the two systems.

Full testing has now begun on the new system to ensure we have no regressions and functionally everything is still working. Assuming nothing goes horrendously wrong, we’ll be looking to onboard more testers in the next couple days!


Here’s also a picture of a small prototype I did at 4am this morning :sweat_smile: It’s clearly not perfect, and needs a lot of work - but it’s progress…

This project may start with email receipts, but that’s not where I want to stop :wink:

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Anybody who joined the waitlist before 5pm today has also now been whitelisted :raised_hands:

If anybody has any troubles, message me privately and I can give you the help you need!

If you haven’t received an email, please check your spam/junk (especially hotmail users, not had any issues with Gmail yet!). If you still can’t find any email, and you joined the whitelist, also message me and I’ll give you the details you need.

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Thanks for adding me, @Sherlock :smiley: I’ve just started having a play and I’m really impressed with how this is working so far! The feed items are a nice touch too :clap:t3:

image image image

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Well this afternoon sure has been interesting!

We’ve gone from 35 users to 49 users (11 awaiting). Processed 70 receipts successfully totalling just over £1000 in the space of a couple hours.

The most common failures are due the transaction being too old (more than 90 days) or coming from an unsupported merchant (while we do support 26, it’s only those 26 at the moment!)

The most common merchant is (by far) Amazon - though that’s not surprising anyone!

Hoping to start consistently adding new merchants over the next week! (Testers: Feel free to DM me with your top three merchants and I’ll prioritise if there are trends)

I want to say a huge thanks to everyone who’s been supporting the project so far :raised_hands::heart:

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Payslips linked to salary payments would be neat, but I guess there’s lots of different formats for a payslip.

Hi,

I’d love to join the wait list.
I was in the process of building an API to do just this, with a front end made in React or React-Native (still learning this) so might be able to help out if you want any UI or JS stuff doing!

I think you’ve hit it on the nail with “lots of different formats”. Would love to support it, just a lot of work would need to go into it.

I also need to test whether I can even add receipts to BACS/FPS transactions, still on my to do list.

Feel free to DM me and I can give you some details :smile:

Prompted by the previous message about salary payments (and having planned on doing this test a while back)…

I can not add receipts to Direct Debits, Pot Transfers, or any credit transaction (including Standing Orders, Refunds, Monzo.Me etc)

I can add receipts to normal card payments and Standing Orders going out of your account.

This is a bit of a shame as it means I can’t detail where or why you got a refund, add payslips to salary payments, etc. I’ve made a note on this (adding to my ever growing list of wishes) and hope that one day Monzo add more flexibility into these receipts!

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Thanks for all your efforts on this, James!

When you say what you can and cannot do, am I right in assuming that’s due to the Monzo API rather than for any other reason?

PS I’ve been really rubbish in volunteering to test - I really want to but I’ve been a bit busy and you’ll probably get more out of other testers for now! Still super supportive, though :slight_smile:

Everything is working smoothly so far! Great work.
I’m not sure if this is the right place, but a suggestion for a merchant could be cinemas? Vue, Odeon etc

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Improving descriptions
Another day, another improvement - receipt “notes” are now shown without a price next to them. This is useful for receipts where extra information is being added to give context (see an example below!)

This is already supported by all merchants added since Deliveroo and will be supported for older merchants when they are updated to the new system!

Yes! I get an error back from Monzo stating “Receipts cannot be stored against credit transactions” or (strangely) just “Access forbidden due to insufficient permissions” on some transactions. As soon as Monzo added support for this, my systems would be able to handle it.

Whether it’s one transaction or one hundred transacions, any help is really nice!

:raised_hands: Thanks!

Yes! This is high up on my list with transport receipts (trainline, etc).

What’s next?
After a relatively successful day of adding more people, my next steps (following on from notes in previous messages)

  1. Migrate all merchants to the new handler (Increasing reliability, maintainability and adding new functionality like “notes”)
  2. Remove the old systems and do some basic clean up!
  3. Introduce another batch of merchants (Bringing us up to 35-40)
  4. Investigate use of transaction attachments - Could I add a map to a transaction for Uber receipts? QR codes for cinema tickets? etc.
    • Part of this investigation is into parsing email attachments too, such as attached HTML documents or even PDFs :eyes:

I’m also always interested in hearing feedback from you, the community! Whether you’re already testing or whether you’re following on from a far - what do you wish this system could do?

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I would love to test this out!

Hi mate,

Just started testing, amazing works so far, it just works!!

Seeing your comment above about testing paper receipts, that looks amazing…
At the moment I upload a photo of a paper receipt to each transaction… but it would be really good to get it to look at that photo and extract the data…

Would work well for supermarket receipts etc…

Keep up the good work!
Dan

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Feel free to DM me :wink:

I know a lot of people do, and that’s why I would like to build on top of that and actually give better data to users. Gonna be a while before it gets anywhere near competent enough, but should be really beneficial when done.

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The other way of getting some payslip details should be to use the HMRC API which should at least provide the PAYE and employees NI amounts.

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