Managing future transactions
So previously, I suggested a big tidy up of the UI, and to put budgeting features in an easy to find place.
I thought, though, that now is the right time for a deep-dive into ‘recurring and future transactions’. But to do that properly, let’s step back and look at what problem we’re trying to solve.
We’ve seen from polls that the Left to Spend figure is really important to people. But we’ve also seen lots of folk wander onto the Community confused about what the figure means. It’s confusing for two reasons: firstly it’s not really clear what you’re looking at and what the various figures mean (I’ll come back to how to better present the different forms of balance in a separate post). Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the Monzo app goes some way in predicting future spend - but doesn’t get it right, and doesn’t let the user have total control over their future spend.
To solve this, I’m suggesting that again we take some of the functionality that currently lives in Summary, polish it up properly and (in this case) significantly add to it. We’ll also need to find a better, more natural home, in the app.
A few principles:
- Users should be able to easily see all future transactions in the app, for whatever period they choose. It might be nice to give a rolling option (e.g. next 30 days) as well as pay periods.
- Unlike recurring transactions at the moment, we should be able to manually add and edit them.
- Future transactions must cover debits and credits. It’s a waste of time if you can’t tell Monzo that you have a transfer from your savings account coming in tomorrow to cover and unexpected bill - or if it doesn’t know that you’re getting paid next week.
- Future transactions should elegantly match up with real transactions, or otherwise disappear when it’s clear that it’s not going to happen. That includes merging future transactions with upcoming BACS transactions that haven’t hit yet.
- The Left to Spend figure should add up future transactions then subtract that from your balance. There seems to be a bit of logic at the that tries to estimate your daily expenditure: bin that - it’s confusing. Just keep it simple.
- It should integrate with envelope / pot budgeting: if you add in a future transaction (e.g. a new car in December) then it’d be cool for the app to suggest that you need to set aside £200/month to be able to afford it - and then go ahead and set that all up with a tap.
(Mocking this one up is complicated. I think it should somehow be accessible from the feed, rather than a separate place in the app. I think @davidwalton was on to something, though - it just needs to be done elegantly in a way that can show/hide future transactions without introducing too much ‘busyness’ to the app. So this is me saying maybe a mock in the future, maybe not… 
)