I’ve recently switched over to Monzo and really enjoying the user experience so far - in particular the monthly budget summary.
Today I paid for 5x flights for myself and 4x friends to fly out to Barcelona later in the year. I realised we could bypass the Ryanair pricing algorithms if were to purchase all the flights through one transaction, rather than individually.
Each of my friends transferred me the per person flight cost via their banks FPS (Faster Payments Service). My thinking was that 4x incoming payments would reduce the large overspend showing in the my ‘Holiday’ category for that month and leave only the cost of my flight to go against this months budget.
When I later revisited my ‘Holiday’ category in the summary tab, the incoming faster payments from each of my friends weren’t showing. I reached out to one of the Monzo Specialists who confirmed any payments made via the FPS can’t be included in the summary at the moment. I’m now left with a skewed ‘Holiday’ budget for this month as I can’t reduce the £300 Ryanair transaction with several incoming payments against that category from friends.
In my opinion it would be much more useful if faster payments could be included and reduce any expenditure in a budget category. Currently this somewhat renders the budget section ineffective if you can’t use incoming faster payments to offset any outgoings to provide a true reflection of your monthly expenditure.
With hindsight, I could have used the Monzo ‘Shared’ tabs feature. However most of my friends had already made the payment given they already had my account number and sort code saved.
Thanks!
I’m able to assign the FPS as ‘Holiday’ as you mention, however they then don’t show in the budget Summary tab when I click on ‘Holiday’ there.
This feature has already been suggested. You can vote for it here:
I also think that this feature would need an Income category to prevent the category which you assign your salary (or the transfer of spending from another bank account) being completely overpowered by the incoming salary.
ie: if you assign your salary to General, then the General category will always be positive, preventing you from budgeting for spend assigned to that category. The overall budget would also be affected.
Just a thought, but what happens if you assign the FPS payments as holiday?
