Income/salary category

[Skylights (Justin Seals)]

For ages now it’s always slightly annoyed me my incoming salary is set to “general” category and the generic icon. It must be pretty easy for Monzo to know what’s an incoming salary payment and I feel it should have its own category and icon, it’s not really general, is it?

[awjdean]

Having a Salary or Income category would also pave the way to including including bank transfers in budget categories:

Include bank transfers in budget categories

I know this has been brought up a lot of times but are Monzo considering including bank transfers in budget categories. Today i received compensation for a flight delay, as the money was sent through a bank transfer although I changed it to the holiday category it does not appear within my budget ie this payment should reduce my monthly allowance Surely this can not be hard to rectify, surely it must be better just to include all payments/transfers in the budget then people have the option to …

[monzo2018]

I assign mine to the Finances category - but would prefer for there to be a specific salary icon/category.

[adinus (Adam)]

I assign mine to “finance” and use #salary as a tag so I can search / filter to see my previous incoming salary payments.

I don’t know what use a salary category alone would have as it’s not something you budget.

[Js38wju3jda]

Mine shows my employers logo?

[awjdean]

@adinus

I don’t know what use a salary category alone would have as it’s not something you budget.

If bacs credits and bank transfers are included in budgets/Summary, which would be very useful from a budgeting standpoint (eg: if someone transfers you their part of a transaction via bank transfer or a refund is received via bacs credit), then an Income category would be required 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. This Income category would also need to not count towards any overall budget set in Summary and the ability to set a budget for the Income category also wouldn’t be needed.

For example: 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. Any overall budget would also be affected by this income.

An alternative option would be to not give any incoming transactions (not from Bill Splits) a category (ie: their category would be unassigned), but that basically sounds like an “unassigned” category would have to be created. In that case, it would be a better UX to just call that category “Income” and give it a logo.

[adinus (Adam)]

Can’t you just exclude those incoming payments from summary?

[awjdean]

@adinus

Can’t you just exclude those incoming payments from summary

Currently, you can’t exclude incoming payments from Summary, but you can vote for that feature here:

Exclude income from spending summary

I would like to be able to receive one-off payments and exclude them from my spending summary. This issue becomes particularly apparent when splitting a bill. If I split a payment that I’ve excluded from my summary, then the income I receive from the other payees adds a positive balance to my budget and throws off my calculations.

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However, I think an Income category would be better than the ability to exclude incoming payments from Summary for the following reasons:

1. Income transactions excluded from Summary would still need to be assigned a category, but the category is irrelevant because the transaction doesn’t count towards that category in Summary. This seems counterintuitive and it makes more logical sense to just have an income category.

2. It would be easier to find income in an Income category from Summary than it would to find income excluded from Summary, since you could just click on Summary and then click on the Income category. This also makes sense from a UX point of view, since a user who knows how to view all the transactions in a category would expect the same UX from an Income category.

3. It’s easier to view the category of a transaction than it is to see if it’s excluded from Summary. To view the category you just click on the transaction in the feed and it’s there. To see if a transaction has been excluded from Summary, you have to click on the transaction and then scroll down.
   NB: this is a really minor UX point, but loads of minor UX improvements add up to a great UX overall.

4. If an Income category is created, you’d only have to assign your salary (or transfer from your main bank account) to the Income category once and it would be remembered for future transactions.

[adinus (Adam)]

Dunno, I just think the Finance category covers this

Not that I’d mind an Income category, but it would clutter things a little I think.

Maybe custom categories would cover this for you.

[awjdean]

@adinus

Dunno, I just think the Finance category covers this

I think the Finance category is meant to help people track of outgoings to stuff like external savings accounts or Stocks & Shares trading platforms.

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@adinus

Maybe custom categories would cover this for you.

I guess custom categorises would sort this issue, but having an Income category would sort the category overpowering issue from including bank transfers in budget categorises for all users.

Custom Categories would be a very useful feature, but it shouldn’t be the thing thrown around as a solution to any of the issues with the default categorises imo.