Fixing financial planning and analysis

Yes please to all these pots changes. Another topic I have Opinions about!!

Can I throw some of this into the mix, for more pot based discussions. I think most of these have come up through the course of feedback suggestions anyway, but I think they all have a financial planning flavour to them:

As someone who likes to use my pots as envelopes:

  • Increase the total number available - much like having only a small number of categories, if you are using Pots for planning, you can only be so specific with the limit of 20, and I need more!
  • As well as the ability to link Virtual Cards to a Pot, I’d love to see Virtual Cards on Apple Pay (slightly different flavour to @Peter_G’s suggestion of linking a pot to apple pay
  • Direct Pot-to-Pot transfers - so I don’t have to clutter up my feed with moves in and out
  • And finally a way to natively assign a merchant to a pot (which is again similar to pay from pot, but at the merchant level rather than card level). I think in this bucket there is the potential for all sorts of “Do X From Pot” type activities, I hope more come
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Correct. It’s really my budget for this month and just seeing how I did in a previous month. I used that screen grab as it’s one I had for my sheets guide in the comparison.

budget and spend

So now I know I’m doing better than last month and if I want to splurge a bit, there’s room there.

I won’t quote your whole post but that is a collection of excellent thoughts on pots. To to be able to have a virtual card in ApplePay that’s attached to a pot would be amazing.

This is my biggest want. Not so much for the feed, but I keep pots hidden. I got a refund this morning that I wanted to move. So I had to unhide a pot, move it, then rehide the pot.

“Move this incoming payment to Pot” would be wonderful.

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I actually had a much longer post prepped that included that, but I edited for simplicity!

I would have said that there are two broad options: you connect a virtual card to a pot (and to the Pays) or that you add specific merchants to a pot. The latter way, it shouldn’t really matter how you pay - it’d always come out of the pot. But I think that comes with significant complexity - and the logic would need to be perfomed in the miliseconds that Monzo has to process a card transaction. So, I suppose I (regrettably) discounted it to focus on a simpler (?) option that option A gives us. Which, I think, would cover 80% (if not significantly more) of the need…

As for these, a big yes! :tada:

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Loving all of this :clap:

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My biggest gripe with having loads of pots is the interface. The more I have the more archaic it becomes very quickly and the harder it is to find and do what I want. I currently have 3 in rotation at all times. One for direct debits, one for PayPal, and one for credit cards. Any more than that and it gets too cumbersome for me so I think pots need a significant UI rethink,

This is exactly how I’d like to see that work too. There are some limits with the way Apple Pay works that I think would inhibit how much you could do with going the pot route. It took N26 years to get the metal design right in Apple Pay, and it was something do with BINs. So I don’t think it’s technologically possible for Monzo to have pot images on the cards, but the colour you choose for the virtual card is certainly doable I think.

Now this is an approach to having recurring payments tied to a pot that I love, and I think actually prefer. In theory, it sounds like it’d be easier to implement too. I’d even settle for an auto pay-back from pot style system too. Given that in essence it’s sort of how bill pots work anyway, and the process can always be cleaned up on the front end to make this invisible.

Yes please. The way N26 did this was my (second) favourite thing about the app (second because I was too in love with the Jedi swipe gesture to blur out your balances). The drag and drop method of transferring between spaces and your main account was so intuitive.

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I don’t have any hidden pots… So have never experienced this… But seriously… You can’t move money into a hidden Pot? I can understand not having the ability to move money out

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Yes, its a bit annoying!

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Someone correct me if I’m wrong please, but I believe it is possible to transfer to a hidden pot via salary sorter. I’m sure that worked for me a couple months back. You can also transfer to it without unhiding it if you search for the pot name in your transaction feed.

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I see that’s been in the past part of the reason why Monzo have said it’s not [currently] viable - totally get the logic behind the limited time for actions, but @N26throwaway covers it well:

Basically a “pay back” system would work.

In my head, I can envision the “instant decision” transactions being the “Pay from Pot” link, wether than is a VCard or the Mobile Pay from Pot (or whatever iteration, including “Mobile VCard Pay” too which I still would love).

And anything else working on the “Pay back” approach.

It’s sort of a native version of the IFTTT “If transaction at [Vendor]”

That said, all of this would make a great building blocks for a totally integrated style of IFTTT offering - all of which can be a post-transaction trigger to reduce the millisecond decision factor.

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I’ve just hidden a pot to test that, and it looks like that works.

As does this!

What I would really like is a line in the “Payments” screen for an internal transfer, there’s a button already for moving money between Monzo accounts, so a Pot transfer could sit nicely here too. Far less clunky than trying to get to the list of pots. IMO.

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You are correct. This is what I do with Salary Sorter but for ad-hoc transfers it becomes a pain.

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There’s a really interesting topic on the two options here:

I was pushing for the “pay-back” option because I thought that it would be easier and quicker. Lots of interesting feedback from Monzo peeps on why it’s not, though:

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So let’s pick this up again

Introduce More Pot Types… pt 2

If we agree that pots are essential to budgeting properly, we need to pay them a little more love. So this is more than pot types, it’s what you can do with pots - and how to do it with them.

Let’s start with some basics

  1. As others have pointed out, 20 pots is not enough. It’s artificial limit - I’d suggest removing it and seeing what folk do. Then optimise for, say, the median number. (I’d argue that, if the changes suggested in this post come to be then no great changes are needed to the interface).

  2. We do, though, need better ways to transfer money between pots. This is really a separate topic, but I’d suggest that the improvements we’ve seen to transfer money between personal, joint and business accounts be extended to pots. And that the behaviour to transfer money to pots is aligned to external account sending.

  3. We’ve seen that pots are (hopefully) getting a feed. This is a positive start that allows them to evolve to be the source of money transfers and to hook card transactions to. Hopefully we’ll see this soon!

  4. One simple tweak, from the transactions screen, would be to allow users to push or pull money from pots. Money into the account? Tap to move it to a pot / external account. Money out of the account? Tap to pull that value from a pot / external account.

The more interesting stuff:

  1. Be able to flag pots as offset pots. This would mean that the value in them would be included for overdraft (and speculatively credit card) purposes. So if you held a total of £1000 in offset pots, you wouldn’t be charged an overdraft until, and could be overdrawn up to, -£1000. The current set up is controversial, but I think is helpful for some scenarios. It’d offer better possibilities - and help stimulate Plus/Premium subscriptions - if this were available for paid customers.

  2. Make pots available for non-Monzo accounts. This might sound a bit odd, but bear with me: imagine you have £2000 in a Nationwide account. In the Monzo app, you could squirrels these into pots, so you know what the money is to be used for. It won’t affect the money in the account, or even ring-fence it, but visually it would be handy to see what you’ve earmarked it for.

  3. Dates for goals in Pots. And more intelligence - so if you know that you want to achieve £100 by next month, the app could suggest saving £x/day or £y/week - and set up the transfers with one tap should you approve them.

  4. Integrate Pots goals with bills, upcoming payments and open banking. So if I know that my credit card bill is £200, and that can be pulled from open banking, set that as the goal amount. Similarly, if the (currently dumb) credit score thing says I have £1345 outstanding in loans, offer me a plan to squirrel that way in Pots - and hook it to the right direct debits so it gets taken automatically.

Anything else I’ve missed on pots? I feel like there’s a lot more that could happen with them.

What might this look like? Just a few basic ones for today…

On the transactions screen:

On the Pots screen:

I promise that :soon: soon :soon: :tm: we’ll get to some of the analytics and backward looking stuff… :pray:

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Just replying to this to say I really do think we need to be able to collapse tomorrow/upcoming transactions, whatever other changes may or may not happen.

I now have this scenario at the end of every month which means opening the app shows me nearly 0 useful information. Especially as most of these are internal pot transfers I’ve set up…

  1. I know!
  2. The money isn’t even going out of my account and the transactions are entirely irreversible.

I simply don’t need this front and centre over actually seeing my latest transactions.

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This is one of my biggest gripes. I keep posts hidden for aesthetics and because I don’t need to see them daily but adding to them (with the exception of salary sort) is a pain.

Being able to split any incoming payment to pots would be ideal. I got a refund for something the other day. I had to unhide two pots, split the spare change part into my coin jar and the rest into another. Then rehide them.

What I find so bizarre about this is that money in pots counts towards interest (if with Plus/Premium)

If I had an overdraft and I was trying to pay it off/stay out of it but couldn’t commit to that 100%, I think it would be good to have an overdraft pot.

Account = -£996.52
Overdraft pot - £1000

Currently to Monzo that would make me £996.52 overdrawn in reality I have £3.48

But they think it’s better that my account says

Account = £3.48

Pots are trying to be “out of sight, out of mind” but then half arse it for the very people it needs to help.

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Agree with all of this.

Been living with Monzo’s overdraft ‘reasoning’ for so long, I hadn’t even thought of how ridiculously inconsistent the overdraft vs interest situation is for plus.

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Looks like you’ve already voted for it :+1:

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Haha I couldn’t find that at all before I posted here but was sure I’d seen a whole thread on it! :persevere:

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Where were we? Yes, we’re at

Powerful search and filters on the transaction feed.

Way back in time, before there was Summary, Monzo had the Spending tab. This gave some nice run downs of amounts spent by category and merchant (I think - my memory is hazy and my google-fu is failing me).

Separately, the iPhone app has some excellent search functionality (which is sorely lacking on the Android version, but I digress) which lets you search by merchant, location and loads (and loads) of other stuff. It’s one of the rare occasions where someone has really thought about the problem and really delivered on it. It’s excellent (even if, reportedly, it kinda didn’t work for a while).

So, what do these things tell us? I think they tell us that (looking at the budgeting poll) that users really want this form of insight. But instead of giving it to us over time, it’s actually been taken away by Monzo - or only available to a subset of users. This needs to be fixed!

How to do this?

This one is quite simple, I think…

  1. Bring search parity to Android

Then…

  1. Add in the ability to only see credits or debits
  2. Let users save searches - let’s call them filters.
  3. Let users sort group transactions (for example by merchant or by category)
  4. Let users sort transactions by things other than date. By merchant name, category name, or value would be a good start.

I was originally attracted by this (from this post):

But I can’t see how it works with the current app set up. I’m attracted by a simple tab, but then you’d need a date range and you might as well do it from a proper filter. And, in any event it’d end up looking like my Dozens mock.

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If you have this

You get this anyway.

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