Intro to Core Experience 🎉

[JIMMWX (Village Idiot)]

From reading that thread I found out @avb is a fanatic. Interesting times…

[dinosm]

Little annoying things that could be better:

• Bills pot / Left To Pay: this is good to have, but tapping it should show me the list of all the payments that make up that total. As it stands, it’s semi-useful, but it changes when something happens (like I add a new regular payment, or a previous regular payment was taken out but the amount was slightly different) and suddenly the app tells me there is not enough money in the pot but I am not readily sure as to why.

• Shared Tab / Recurring bills: I recently discovered I can split recurring bills but only in half. Why? I have a recurring bill I split in a different way (always the same way), surely I should be able to set it up either as a % or as a set amount for one person and the rest for another? I know the current situation is because the amount can change from month to month, but % or set-amount would work with the amount changing monthly.

[Peter_G]

@Peter_G

Here’s a big one for me: tweak the Left to Pay section under the manage tab for bills pots so it’s clear what transactions are in this period and what are in next. At the moment, tapping Upcoming gives me a chronological list of payments that will come from that pot. I’d like a nice division between what’s left this budgeting period and what’s in next. With subtotals please!

Here’s a real life example.

I pay council tax ten months in twelve. No payments in February or March.

Now, there’s a left to pay figure in my bills pot which seems slightly lower than usual, but not quite low enough to have excluded the council tax bill (I think). The bill would have been due on the 3rd but now it’s the 6th.

Basically, I’m after better transparently in the bills pot of what’s gone, what’s to come, and whether Monzo think the bill’s just late or whether it’s been written off for it month.

[Peter_G]

Part 14226 of the megapost:

• I’d like to see more made of #Tags. I use them as subcategories but also for thematic things. For example, I create a tag for holidays (e.g. #China2019) or if I’ve a project on the go (#GarageConversion2021). In an ideal world, I’d like them to become first class citizens with autocomplete on Android and to be able to display them as an alternative to merchants or categories in Trends.

• I’d like to see notification history. The ones that really interest me are the “your DD is £x higher/lower than previously”. But that information vanishes when I clear the notification.

• This leads me to something I’d love: Trends-esque graphs for regular (or any) payment. Imagine being able to tap into a direct debit and see a line graph of how much it’s cost you every period. Then the ability to tell it how much to expect for future periods…

[Peter_G]

Another small quality of life improvement: can we change categories and add notes for future Monzo transactions?

I mean standing orders and direct debits that are showing in the feed for the coming days…

[richycran (Rich)]

@Peter_G

This leads me to something I’d love: Trends-esque graphs for regular (or any) payment. Imagine being able to tap into a direct debit and see a line graph of how much it’s cost you every period. Then the ability to tell it how much to expect for future periods…

Or #hashtagged transactions.

Would love to know what the profile of my #bigshop is over time and whether my attempts to buy less of allthecheese (so pricey now!) is making a difference.

[chloelawrence (Chloe)]

Thanks so much for telling us all of that, Peter! It is so helpful and I’m making notes of all of your points as it’s definitely an area we want to improve (you’ll be glad to hear!). I’m also very keen to hear your ideas too on what you’d like to see instead

[Heldiney]

This is super helpful, Peter—thank you for making the time to clearly describe your thoughts to us. Like Chloe said, what would solutions look like to some of the points you described?

[nathanthomson8 (Nathan)]

Ohh i just remembered one and ive posted about this elsewhere but ill rebring to your attention.

When paying someone for a bill split the notes should be autopopulated with the retailer name so that when i search for say “mcdonalds” these transactions will be shown also.

At the minute it shows as “For: mcdonalds” in the feed which is fine but this isnt stored in notes so is pointless when it comes to searching

[tomerlandsen (Thomas Erlandsen)]

I would love to see improvements in how Shared Tabs work, particularly when it comes to budgeting. My partner and I use shared tabs to add lots of smaller payments for things, then once a month or so we settle up.

The problem is that the settling up payment is treated as one payment categorised as “General”, so it breaks budgeting completely. If we’ve categorised all the individual payments we’ve put in (bills, groceries, entertainment, etc), then when you settle up that information should be taken into account. The settling up payment should be split into the different spending categories that reflect how you actually spent the money. Going into that single settling up transaction could even show a breakdown of all the transactions and how they balance out to that one (sent or received) lump of money

[dinosm]

I think this might fall under ‘core experience’ as it probably straddles microservices and/or app features/areas…

Flex purchases I make don’t immediately show up as selectable in my Shared Tab, so I can’t immediately log them in the tab to be shared. I haven’t sat to measure exactly how long it takes before a Flex transaction shows up, but it’s more than 3-4 minutes (by which time I am doing something else like having left the shop and driving), which makes me forget to add them to the tab later.

[Peter_G]

Here’s a small tweak but massive quality of life improvement:

When you’re settling up a monthly recurring payment that falls on the last day of a month that doesn’t have 31 days, ask whether I want it to have it repeat every 28th (if it’s February for example) or on the last day of the month (whatever that is).

And on a similar theme, I’d like more sophisticated management of recurring payments. For example, I have a direct debit that goes out three times a month, for different values and with different timing (one out on the 1st, one the 10th and the last the 28th). It would be good for the recurring payments mechanism to be able to flex to handle this. I’ve set this up as three monthly payments with the direct debit originator, but they all have the same reference, but I’d like to be able to tell Monzo it’s actually three payments recurring monthly, rather than fudging it into fortnightly repeating.

[BristolMatt (Matt C)]

Something that is bugging me at the moment, especially now that I am trying to use Trends more, is that whenever I get money transferred back to me as part of a bill split from my partner, I have to constantly go in and categorise it. I have a category with my partners name that I exclude from Trends, but every time I have to manually set that category. Is there no way to have all incoming transfers from a contact be attributed to a certain category automatically? Not sure if I am explaining this very well!

(Don’t use shared tab as a lot of the time things aren’t split evenly)

[Carlo1460]

You’d need to change the Spend to partners category to then auto adapt their income bill split to partners category.

It’s not possible to amend all incoming payments from someone to be the same category. It would only follow what the original spend categorised as via splitting.

[giorgio (Giorgio Baglioni)]

For sure! @Heldiney I hope you’re taking a at this

[giorgio (Giorgio Baglioni)]

@nurlan this is cool

[Peter_G]

@chloelawrence

I’m also very keen to hear your ideas too on what you’d like to see instead

@Heldiney

what would solutions look like to some of the points you described?

I’ll probably do a few of these, but here’s today’s pain point:

So the biggest issue here is that the screen is inaccurate: I have one more payment this month (for £72.45), not the 4+9 that are shown here.

So what do I want instead:

• I want a clear indication of how many more payments are due out this pay period and their total value. With a button a can tap to see them listed, with a clear indication of what’s in this month and what’s coming next.

• On that screen, I want to be able to tell Monzo if a certain direct debit (e.g. my council tax) isn’t going to be collected that month and for it then to come off of the list and the left to pay amount reduced. Conversely, I want to tell Monzo ahead of time how much my credit card bill is going to be.

• I’d like the screen shown above to show me somewhere the excess funds I have in the pot (£268.86 - £72.45 = £196.41). That’s because I might want to withdraw that amount, or reduce my scheduled pot transfer to compensate.

• But I want the bills pot to be better! I want Monzo to know the total amount that I need to have in the pot to conver my bills at the beginning of each period (i.e. the total of all upcoming transactions that are paid from that pot) then when I’m paid just top up the pot to that amount.

• I’d also like an option to move the excess funds to another pot or account. Or to schedule the pot to transfer its entire contents on a specified date.

Lots more thoughts

(I think that we basically need a tweaked transaction screen and a reimagined transfers/payments one. I shall try to resist the urge to mock them up, but will come back to them later).

[giorgio (Giorgio Baglioni)]

Hey Matt, thanks for sharing! Curious to hear a bit more about this

Let’s say you split a Tesco (groceries) transaction with your partner, when they pay back what is it appearing as? My assumption reading this is that it’s getting categorised as General - is that right?

If so, I wonder if having it match what you set the original transaction to would help (so in this case, it would auto recognise as Groceries instead? There would be some challenge with custom categories there, but for most cases of people splitting non-custom categories, that may help

[BristolMatt (Matt C)]

Hi @giorgio - thanks for the message!

I’ve been a tad stupid, I think. I am actually talking more about transfer requests. So when I send a request for £5 from my partner for something that I didn’t pay for through Monzo, it always comes back into my account as General, where I would always want it to be set to the category I have set up for him. I just didn’t know if there would be anyway to link a custom category to a contact for incoming transfers. I appreciate these things are complicated.

[giorgio (Giorgio Baglioni)]

Ah, not stupid at all! I think I get you, how are you doing the transfers right now? Are you sending them a monzo.me link?