My arithmetic: 608.47 - 260 = 348.47
Monzo arithmetic: 608.47 - 260 = 525.14
All the Monzo help documents say that “Left to spend” equals “Current balance” minus “Upcoming payments”, so I can’t see how I could be confused about this.
How to reproduce: It just happens. I’ve noticed that things don’t add up often enough that I’ve stopped paying attention.
IOS 15
iPhone
It’s not just what is due tomorrow. Do you have other payments due in this period?
Isn’t it a case that budget isn’t related to how much you have in the bank?
How is that layout so different…
Hi @AndyB & welcome 
Do you have other income planned (aka: Monzo knows about it) in the next 8 days?
In other news: Carousel view still active here 
Thanks for your reply, but I’m not sure I understand. None of these numbers are how much I have in the bank – it’s just my current account.
My only question is: If I have £608.47 in my current account, and £260 of upcoming payments, then why am I being told I have £525.13 left to spend over 9 days?
Perhaps the layout is unrelated?
Thanks. I’m not aware of any income before my payday.
I hope layout issues don’t become a distraction – I’m fond of my little 2016 iPhone SE, and I don’t think it’s to blame for the arithmetic issue 
Thanks for your reply. No I don’t.
I don’t recognise the screen, are you using summary or trends (it pains me that both still exist). They both work differently.
For trends, left to spend is actually your set budget - spent so far - upcoming payments I believe, the account balance doesn’t affect it I don’t think. Summary, I’m not so sure.
It’s just the main screen with left to spend turned on.
I turned mine off because it really wasn’t close to accurate. Like a few things it felt designed and then left to rot.
How quickly we forget
That’s the ‘old’ carousel Home view, showing the ‘old’ Left-to-spend bar, calculated via Summary.
The same calculated Left-to-spend value is also (and soon will be the only) available in Trends → target account(s) Balance → Left to spend
Have you set up a new direct debit in this period or is there a new “upcoming payments” that you wouldn’t have had in another period? I’ve noticed that this has confused my “left to spend” previously, it feels like the “upcoming payments” for this calculation is recorded at the start of month and new direct debits while changing the “upcoming payments” shown on app, it doesn’t update it for this calculation.
I’ve also noticed that any schedule transfers to pots are not included in this calculation so I always find that my “left to spend” is always higher than it should be, not as reliable as I think could be.
Still there if you tap on the coral Monzo debit card from main screen and go into the “Current account view”
Is anything set to recurring that won’t reoccur?
I was confusing myself I think.
What I had in my head was the number at the top in white was your current balance.
The green the remaining budget which is not connected to balance. A budget being £50, £500, £5000 or whatever it was set to split over the time period.
So it was just set to something like £2000, and showing you had £525.14 left of that £2000.
Thanks for the replies. I haven’t set up any new direct debits, and there are no transfers to pots in the period. I don’t believe there is anything set to recurring that won’t recur.
You are correct that this is the view I get to by tapping the coral card from the home screen.
This is the situation today:
Clearly there are more upcoming payments in the period – and the arithmetic may be correct today. But that doesn’t explain what was wrong with the arithmetic yesterday. I would have thought the calculation was quite simple: subtract all the period’s upcoming payments from the amount in the current account. I would love to understand what can go wrong with that.
But there was now clearly more than £260 coming from the account this month. The left to spend includes future upcoming payments. It’s not a day-to-day calculation, so you should have, for example, included the £10.99 Paypal payment in your calculations yesterday.
It isn’t going to be wrong. It’s quite a simple sum.
There will be something repeating, something counted that you don’t want to count (a direct debit that is bi-monthly that Monzo thinks is monthly for example) or a period extended where you don’t want it to be.
Agreed, but the issue I’m trying to focus on is how come Monzo can’t get it right!
I was showcasing my own arithmetic just to indicate that even without considering possible future upcoming payments, I still get a number lower than what Monzo gives me for “left to spend”.
I can indeed get the correct number by looking through my account and adding up all the upcoming payments, etc., but I thought the idea behind this feature was that I wouldn’t need to…
I see what you mean. I think you complicated things by doing your own calculation as I think we then fixated on that as the issue.
The amount left to spend was far too high and it’s unclear how Monzo got this figure, I assume you mean. I have no idea, and I don’t use it for that reason.
However I think this is being phased out or hardly used anyway so I wouldn’t hold much hope for them to look too deeply into it.
I think this particular feature was always a little odd in how it was meant to operate. It aims to make an educated guess based on what’s due to come out, and how you’ve been spending, essentially working out at a burn rate, but it falls over because it can’t predict the future all that well.
So, manual checking is almost always going to give you a different number. I don’t think they ever really got this right, as others have said it is being moved into ‘spotlights’ but I’ve aways found that target and balance do a better job anyway.
Thanks, that might be a clue. Looking at the difference between today and yesterday, it seems to me that Monzo was off by £250 yesterday, but today might be correct.
So it suggests that perhaps it was the £250 to Sainsbury’s that yesterday Monzo didn’t think it needed to count.
That’s a direct debit. I had assumed until now that direct debits are automatically included in the summary – is this not correct? I have possibly eight or nine other monthly direct debits that are currently active, but these do seem to automatically form part of the summary.
I tapped on the Sainsbury’s payment, and noticed two things:
Exclude from Summary is disabled – this is what I would expect, suggesting that it should be in the summary.
Repeating payment is also disabled. Is this to be expected? If I try enabling the option, it says Create Subscription?
Should I do this?
Then the question is – what about my other direct debits? The ones that already seem to be handled perfectly well by my not doing anything. 
Thanks for your help. This may be the explanation. I may be able to take it from here – I guess I probably just need to opt for Create Subscription.
