Flex payment - categories

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Hi folks,

I’ve been trying to use the trends tab more to better track my spending. However, for a while I was confused about how to account for when I use Flex for payments, and when to include or not include my flex account when account for spending.

When you buy something on your regular Monzo card then bounce it to flex, you get the cost of that item transferred back into your current account. So when categorising these transactions, I make sure they’re the same (i.e. both the payment going out and the money coming ‘in’ from flex are categorised the same - so today my protein powder purchase is logged as personal care on both).

However, I realised I had changed the category for my monthly flex payment as ‘transfer’, rather than Flex’s automatic categorisation breakdown based on all the times you’re paying back. Because I’ve logged it as a transfer, it’s no longer included in my summary, so my flex repayments aren’t being considered in my summary.

I could change the payment going out to ‘bills’, but actually I really liked the original thing flex did which was summarising how much I was spending on each category per month in each repayment. However, I’ve tried to go back into Flex repayment category and I can’t change it back to automatically working out the repayment for each category.

So I need help: how can I make my flex monthly payment automatically by split along all the categories of my repayments, rather than having to use one bulk category? This is the default setting for flex repayments, but I have no idea how to return to this default. Please help!

TLDR: How do I return the Monzo flex repayment categories o the default of being split along the requirements for purchases in each category, rather than bulking under one category?

Can someone help?

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(I want the above to be able to be edited back to multiple categories based on the categories of the original payments I’m paying off…boy am I confused about how to explain this, hope someone else gets it!)

1 Like
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Flex’s default for the monthly payments is ‘Transfer’, the categorisation only happens on the initial spend transaction, after that it’s just moving money between accounts.

It used to work how you described before trends was released but was switched to make trends work properly.

3

You can’t.

You can however include Flex in trends and it’ll show you the original spent amount and category but admittedly doesn’t help when you’re repaying over time.

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4

FTFY

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5

I dunno, the way they do it now is the correct why as far as my budgeting works.

6

That might be true, but for a lot of users they totally destroyed months of work categorising items, and seemingly didn’t really care because it fixed the other problem.

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7

Fair, the making of the change without warning was pretty bad form.

History didn’t matter too much for me because the number of pots I’ve had over the years breaks trends so isn’t usable looking backwards anyway :neutral_face:

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8

I find it really difficult using the new way.

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9

I just re-categorise my repayments from “Transfer” to say “Gadgets”, I also de-select Flex from Trends.

“Flexed” transactions are therefore exported to Excel in the correct categories when I make the repayments

10

But surely not when your monthly repayment comes in which covers all purchases, unless all you’ve used it for is Gadgets :eyes:

11

:grinning:

I manually pay individual item due for the month, rather than wait for the automatic debiting for all of the flexed transactions.

12

Dedicated, however, I’d find it too tedious having too many transactions to go through.

Not so bad if you only have a couple.