Expenses category in spending to be ignored in total spending

Feedback & Ideas
1

I thought it might be a neat idea if you could ignore the expenses category in the total spending as I get reimbursed for certain things that I pay for. Maybe still include the overall total but put it smaller below?

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2

This has also been discussed here -

3

Ah cheers didn’t see that!

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4

I think expenses was probably added as a category so you could flag things that you’d get reimbursed from your employer but others might just use it to show up certain things (e.g. separate travel to work from leisure travel) and will still want expenses included in the overall total.

I suggest the following:
An option to excluded expenses from the overall expenses (for those who get these paid by their employer)
Still allow a target for expenses to be set even if the user wants it excluded from the main total (this will be useful if the company has an expense limit)

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5

Agreed. Monzo is great to use for business trips overseas as there aren’t any transition fees. I’d be great to have the option of excluding expenses from the overall monthly budget plan so that reimbursable expenses don’t affect your overall pace, especially if they’re irregular.

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6

I would really appreciate this too - I haven’t gone anywhere near my budget this month personally, but I had to go on a work trip, so I used Monzo to track my spending for that but it’s skyrocketed me through my targets and now I get a bit sad every time I see the notification admonishing me for going through my limit when I actually haven’t!

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7

You’re totally right. We need a way to remove outliers in general. I hope we can get something sort out :soon:

Thanks for the feedback! :heart:

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8

Is there any update on this? I just made a big spend on “expenses” and now for the rest of the month my monthly spending target is going to be pointless. :confounded:

9

My advice would be to increase your Total Monthly Target by the amount that you’ve spent on the expenses. That’ll allow the alerts & performance against target to continue working normally & there’s no link between your Targets from one month to the next (you’ll just need to reduce your Target, back to the normal amount, next month).

Obviously this feature being released will save you from having to manually update your Targets like this but in the meantime, hopefully that solves your problem?

This won’t solve the impact that, that spending has on your pulse graph unfortunately.

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10

Good idea that will be a good workaround for the time being :slight_smile:

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11

Sorry about that. We do need a way of removing outliers from Spending and Targets so they don’t mess everything up. We’ll do it at some point, promise :slight_smile:

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12

This is very much needed, otherwise the expenses classification doesn’t make sense. It would be great if it could get implemented.

Thanks!

13

+1 on this,
Whenever I send $ to someone (they need to top up through me at the moment) I tag it as expenses as I’d assume that’s not included under targets but now my spend is all over the place

14

Hey Lawrence,

I’d be interested to hear some examples of expenses that you wouldn’t want to count against your targets.

I tend to use the General category for anything that I don’t have a fixed target for. But since my Overall Monthly Target is my bank balance, it’s still useful to be able to deduct the transaction from that target. Do you use targets differently?

15

Hey Alex,

I use my Monzo to easily track how much I’m spending a month on day-to-day expenses. This means buying lunch, tube fares, coffees, etc.

Now you’ve provided send to friends functionality, it’s easy to end up in a situation where transferring money via Monzo is the default, easiest method. This is great, but sending £100 to my friend to split a hotel room from when we were on holiday isn’t something I wanted to appear as a day-to-day expense.

On top of this, what about expenses? This category I really expected to be excluded from your monthly targets, as it doesn’t make sense to me to include money I’ll be reimbursed for in the aggregate of how much I have spent this month.

Then there’s the case where you may not have another card on you, and you fall back to Monzo to make a purchase. The other week was a one off payment to my gym as I changed bank accounts and needed to pay on a different card to usual. That put about £150 into my monthly goal that I would never have wanted to track using the Monzo app.

I’m not sure if I’m using Monzo the ‘wrong’ way, but I really like measuring my monthly ‘food and extras’ spend using the app, and it’s frustrating that I can’t opt out larger purchases from factoring into the targets.

Let me know if anything needs clarifying!

Lawrence

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16

Thanks Lawrence, that makes a lot of sense. I’ll come back to the hotel payment scenario in a second…

Expenses definitely do need to be excluded from the targets & the good news is, that’s something that Monzo has said they’ll fix.

Obviously your other use cases relate to the fact that you’ve decided not to use Monzo as your sole payment method. I’m sure there’s quite a lot of users like you at this point but I expect that will change once Monzo launches current accounts & eventually drops the prepaid card.

So my guess is that Monzo won’t be too quick to develop the functionality to exclude other transactions from targets, since if you have a current account, the assumption will be that you’ll use it for all of your purchases.

On the other hand, there will still be users that will want to use another payment method for certain purchases (booking airlines tickets with their credit card, for example) & they will get caught out, in the same way that you’ve described, when they have to use Monzo instead. So I could be wrong about this not being built :slight_smile:

Just to check - if there were additional dedicated category’s that you could link your miscellaneous expenses to, would that solve your problem? There’s already a Holidays category. But perhaps if there was a Health category (for the gym) & a Pets category etc. then you wouldn’t have to log those purchases against your key categories…If so, the categories are due to be reviewed & I expect more will be added…

Following on from that, is there anything that would stop you from wanting to use Monzo for all of your purchases, if it didn’t impact your targets?

Lastly, there is a workaround which will enable you to ensure your targets do provide meaningful information, after you’ve hade to make these exceptional purchases, although it requires a bit of manual effort…

17

Hey Alex,

Thanks for all that info, I think what this is showing is that I’m using my account in a way that isn’t ideally supported by Monzo.

I think if I had this as my sole account then things would be different, but even then I think some users will want specific purchases marked as out-of-scope for their usual budgeting. I’m not sure it’s that healthy to micromanage every expenditure, and some purchases I’ll always rather do outside of whatever tool I’m using!

Thanks,
Lawrence

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18

I don’t think there’s such a thing! That’s what I love about Monzo, as long as you are not a business user, they promised to deliver the product that will solve your problems. Not a subset of problems for most generic users.

Targets functionality is somewhat in v1, that’s only argument why it’s not quite working for you personally yet. :smiley: We do need discussions like this, so thanks for your input!

I’m Android user, so I’ll go back to my corner to cry quietly now. :cry:

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19

I’ve just started using the Targets feature, which so far I think looks great. Nice and simple, so it’s not a hassle to use. However, as noted in this thread, and confirmed by @hugo, it really does need a way to remove expenses and other outliers. Or to allow us to assign top-ups to a category, so that we can ‘cancel out’ any expenses with top-ups.

I assume, though, that development of this type of thing is on the back-burner until current accounts are launched? Or will this be picked up as part of “Update Spending and Targets for current accounts :briefcase:”?

In the meantime, thanks very much @alexs for a useful workaround.

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20

This really is a crucial option that should be added asap :hourglass:. Now the budgeting ability of the app is heavily reduced :chart_with_downwards_trend:because of this (and also because of the refunds not being counted in monthly balances). I need to have a separate app to calculate my months refunds and expenses to know if I am off target or not. :worried:

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