Introducing Salary Sorter and Bills Pots 🎉

[Ordog]

Monzo stole my money!!

2 weeks later… Oh I found it in my Natwest account

[davidwalton (Award Winning Hot Coral Analyst)]

@Peter_G

Your scenario, if I’ve understood correctly(?), sounds a bit like the change that might be happening behind the scenes now: changing pots to be payment accounts. In theory that’d allow for scheduled payments from pots.

Kind of. My scenario was to set up a repeating scheduled payment to an external account, but which is paid from the Bills pot. And then ensure that the amount to cover the transfer to the external account was included in the Salary sort to the Bills pot. So it is a payment from a pot (as is known to current users of Bills pots), but it isn’t a direct payment from a pot.

[duncang (Duncan)]

Honestly, it feels like there’s a layer missing in Monzo. There are all these disparate parts - pots, the bills pot, scheduled payments, salary sorter, the budgets feature (such as it is), IFTTT integration, “Other accounts in Monzo”, and so on. It all feels like different aspects of a whole, but the complete whole is missing. That erstwhile mission of creating a “Financial Control Centre”.

IMHO what is really needed is for Monzo to take a step back from the coalface of individual accounts and pots, and to provide a higher-level interface, one where you can really see your overall financial picture. I think that things as they are at the moment are too wedded to the nitty-gritty of payments flowing in and out of specific accounts and pots, too much at the day-to-day, or single-month level, and not enough at the higher levels needed to actually have an accurate picture of where you are, and where you’re going.

Some questions that I think Monzo could do a much better job in making it easy to answer:

• “What’s my mandatory vs discretionary monthly expenditure”
• “What’s my effective savings rate”
• “What’s my net worth”
• “How long would it take me to save up for X”

[Ordog]

@duncang

Some questions that I think Monzo could do a much better job in making it easy to answer:

• “What’s my mandatory vs discretionary monthly expenditure”
• “What’s my effective savings rate”
• “What’s my net worth”
• “How long would it take me to save up for X”

I fear that their blanket solution to all that was the Google Sheets integration which was put into their premium accounts.

With this they’ve kind of said “here’s all your data to do with as you please” rather than thinking up of every possible budget tracking / graph / dataset people could possibly want. If they started to go down this route it could possibly end up with them diverging more into a budgeting app rather than a bank.

Some would argue they’re synonymous but personally I don’t think they are.

[l33t]

I am getting paid in a couple of days so I will try and frig with it to confirm it all works the way I thought it did but I have my sort fixed right now to spread my pay out across several pots with my bills pot as part of that.
I am hoping it shows the amount I need to cover my new virtual ones coming off that pot as well.
It has meant I worry less about getting my bills to come out around the same date as sorter handles it with 2 taps but I am also pretty static like you.
I thought it did tell me and update but I will check when I get paid. I also wish my council would take tax out in 12 monthly payments instead of 10. It borks me.

[l33t]

@N26throwaway

Just wish the bill transactions stayed in bill pots, instead of cluttering my personal account feed! (Now possible if I revert some back to paying by recurring card payment as opposed to direct debit. Would need a 6th virtual card though!).

Yes the rework with manage is nice but I want it all to be inside the pot with a notification to say it went out if you want. At least a hide option would be nice or something.

Hands getting sore now. Don’t know how these kids type on phones all day

[l33t]

I do like seeing the upcoming dd in the main feed tbh though and I think it would be nice if it did the same for upcoming virtual card bills as well but after it goes just a notification or even a feed item saying “£x of bills went out” with a clear button on the right and if you tap it takes you to the pot rather than the several lines items it is now.

[nameloc2080]

You have the right to pay council tax in 12 payments rather than 10.

[l33t]

Yeah it’s just dealing with the council are a nightmare. Last year they didn’t even send me a new bill.

[Ordog]

Can’t you manage it all online now?

[l33t]

Sadly not where I live. I don’t even think the council has fully gone back to work again since Covid.

[duncang (Duncan)]

I actually created an idea topic for voting purposes, but it would be really good if the salary sorter could have an “automatic” option. If there’s not enough money when it fires then it could just drop that message into your feed and fire a notification. It’s opt-in anyways, so presumably only people who know that they get paid enough by a certain date every single month would use it anyways. It seems really silly not to have this option.

[Peter_G]

@duncang

It seems really silly not to have this option.

I’m with you on this.

Our last, best hope is Babylon 5 the US team who have salary sorter and rules-based transfers on their pipeline…

[StuartL (Stuart)]

I’d like to have a lock/save option for each part of the sort.

My monthly pay is made up of up to 3 parts…

1. My salary
2. Expenses
3. A bonus every 3 months

I use the Salary Sorter to have each of theses go into 3 separate pots.

The expenses and bonus elements vary but as the salary is constant I’d like to “save” or lock that value in the salary sorter.

The rest of my budgeting strategy for anyone who's interested...

I get paid on the 25th, earlier if it falls on a weekend or if I use the Get Paid Early feature, which I almost always do, just because I can.

The salary element goes into the “Sorting Pot” until the first of the month when scheduled transfers split the money into

• Savings pots
• A bills pot
• A card subscription pot
• My joint account
• And finally some to my personal account for my monthly fun money

All of this means my Summary and budgeting periods also aligns with Trends.

What I’d really like to make this work even better for me is…

• Pot to pot transfers
• An expenses category in Trends that is excluded from spending alongside Income, Transfers, and Savings
• A Pulse Graph on trends that would predict my future bills and a income based on previous months/custom time periods

[Revels]

@StuartL

The salary element goes into the “Sorting Pot” until the first of the month when scheduled transfers split the money into

I find it genuinely interesting how imaginative people are with how they organise their money. This is really clever idea.

[StuartL (Stuart)]

The Sorting Pot

[Revels]

This is how I might do the joint account actually. My girlfriend and I get paid upto 10 days apart, so this would be a good solution to have a holding pot and then everything is triggered from there.

Even better if Harry Potter is involved.

[StuartL (Stuart)]

Funny that’s exactly how my Sorting Pot came into being, I get paid a few days before my girlfriend and it bugged me having two different summary periods on my Personal and Joint Accounts so I delayed my pay day with a pot.

[duncang (Duncan)]

@Peter_G

Our last, best hope is Babylon 5 the US team who have salary sorter and rules-based transfers on their pipeline…

Oh, I miss that show so much .

[duncang (Duncan)]

@Revels

so this would be a good solution to have a holding pot and then everything is triggered from there

I suggested this a few years ago, heh.

@duncang

Buffer pot

• Remainder amount (income - (discretionary + bills))
• Bills pot needs to be able to refill from this, because bills are asynchronous

This would help in combining multiple different salary payments, multiple people’s salaries (joint account), and even just re-alinging to a natural monthly cycle if your work pays you on weird dates.