Here’s some tips on how Monzo can help you budget by seeing where your money’s going, and setting limits on your spending! 
7 Likes
Thanks @bea very useful. Yesterday was my first time using the budgeting tool and I struggled with a few bits of it. My first instinct was to use the help section however there was no information on there around how to use the budget tool. I would never have thought to look through blogs. Are there any plans to improve the help content and possibly look at tutorials?
This is useful, thank you.
Like @glasgow, I’ve only recently started to look at budgets and have found them a little confusing to get going with.
One question I do have relates to how they integrate with committed spending. If I set a budget of £500 for transport for example, would that reflect “committed spending” upfront in the form of Direct Debits etc. that I have aligned to the transport category?
It’s difficult for me to tell at the moment as not all of my DD’s have fired with Monzo - I only moved across at the start of the month, but some of the tutorial / help detail is a bit light on detail 
1 Like
+1 for this, needs to be made clearer.
I also raised this exact point in the Summary feedback thread.
I think the most logical thing would be to include your committed spend in your target/plan but it seems to be summary does this the other way around in current form.
So, Direct Debits should automatically appear as committed spending in your Summary tab, along with certain recurring payments like Netflix or Spotify subscriptions.
You can also choose specific transactions and tell us that they’re repeating payments. Just find the transaction in your feed, tap on it and scroll down till you see “Repeating payment”. Turn the toggle on and choose how regularly the payment repeats.
2 Likes
Can you select a pot withdrawal as a salary for summary? I’m a student, and as such being able to pay myself a virtual salary out of a pot would be useful.
1 Like
Neal recently shared we’re doing right now to improve our Help screen (both the way we organise/help you find content and what we actually include)
One thing we’re looking at trying is surfacing different kinds of content in the Help screen – from the community, from the blog, or somewhere else!
We’d love to do more guides/tutorials in general, so good to hear you’re finding them useful 
2 Likes
Thanks @bea. How does that play into budget categories though? I get that DD’s will appear in committed spending, but if I have a transport aligned DD will that offset against my budget category, or will that be detailed spearately?
Basically, should my budgets take account of known / recurring payments that will be collected via DD?
1 Like
That all sounds good, being able to search the help and get blog content would be awesome!
2 Likes
Ah I see! So no, your spending budgets don’t need to take account of Direct Debits and other recurring payments that are classified as committed spending.
You’ll see the category appear twice in your Summary tab, once under ‘Spending’ with all the variable ad hoc stuff you spent on through the month, and once under ‘Committed spending’ with all the repeating payments.
So when you go to set your budgets for each category, you don’t need to factor in the DDs you already have lined up i.e. I might have my £130 travelcard under committed spending, but set myself a £50 spending budget for the ‘transport’ category to reign in my spending on Ubers, for example!
3 Likes
Hmm, you can only choose bank transfers as salaries at the moment, but we know that this is mainly useful for people who get paid regular salaries once a month. Obviously there are loooads of other ways that people get money into their accounts (freelancers, students like yourself!) and we want to make sure Summary works well for everyone.
It might be good to share this in the Summary feedback thread 
3 Likes
Hey @glasgow 
That’s great feedback! There are some pages in the help section about Summary. I think maybe you searched for ‘budgeting’ and nothing came up?
If that’s the case then it would be related to a bigger problem we’ve seen with other features, which is what we call our features. For instance to find information about Savings you would need to search for Pots, and for budgeting you’d search for Summary. One of the ideas is to have our search models pick up the similar words based on how we call our features. Does this answer your question?
4 Likes
Thanks @bruno I searched for “creating a budget” but didn’t get anything suitable. I was more looking for a how to guide on using the budget tool. I muddled my way through though!
1 Like
Makes perfect sense, thanks for following up @glasgow! We’ll improve this in the future, in the meantime you can explore more about it by using the ‘summary’ keyword 
3 Likes
still need more date options for budgeting. many of us don’t get paid monthly. loads of people on weekly, fortnightly and 4 weekly. until these options are added, the budgeting section is useless for us.
surly the back-end is set up in such a way this should be easy to add in.
2 Likes
I have been budgeting for a while now. However monzo tools don’t quite do it for me yet. We are all different and it would be nice if we could custom name Budgets. I would also like to be able to add credit card spending to budgets, and the cash. I am aware it is bank and not budgeting app, it’s just an idea. For budgeting I’m still using Mobills App, since they have more features.