Labs Feedback: Summary 📊

[Buddha]

The summery is really not working for me. I am self employed and have various sized payments coming in each week. The big red dial telling me I’m not going to make it to the end of the month is quite off putting. There should be a way to set your payday other than monthly.

[anon70217964]

The main gripe for me is that I would like to assign my expenses reimbursement to the expenses category. At the moment it looks like I have overspent on Expenses because it doesn’t take into account that I have been reimbursed.

To have everything appear under Income is ok initially, but the ability to assign this to another category is really important otherwise it gives an incorrect income value.

Keep up the good work!

[SC95]

Summary now seems to accept deposits less than £500 for payday. I just managed to set my payday based based on a deposit of £250 which I made actually on my payday from my other bank account.

[alexs (Alex Sherwood)]

The new TestFlight release notes mention improvements to Summary, what should we be looking out for here?

[anon41842569]

Thanks for this - we’re aware Summary isn’t working well enough for people who are self employed. We have a couple of things planned to try and improve things the dial a little:

• We’re going to make the dial less quick to assume you’re going to run out of money
• We’re going to see if setting an overall spending target, and using that for the dial is more suitable for people.

Separately, as a freelancer - what schedule would you use instead of monthly?

[anon41842569]

The iOS Testflight build should have the following fixes:

• The month picker should now show absolute dates, rather than March, March, March
• We’ve reworded the Set Payday flow to Change start date to make it feel less dependant on salary payments.
• If a category (or Pot) nets out at £0, you should be able to navigate to the transaction list, rather than the app assume it is empty.
• Fixes for crashes when updating transactions
• Fixes where the chart on past months doesn’t update when switching months

[Davesanchez (David watson)]

One thing I notice is my pay cycle runs from Apr 26- 25 May that’s because the 26th of may is a Saturday and I get paid the working day before and yet it states 15 days to go! But actually it’s 14 days…

[srrvnn (Saravanan Ganesh)]

This does not work on Android, even when I set my category to bills, or transport or anything else. Is this a bug or is this working as intended?

This is very troublesome and throws off summary from being useful. I pay the rent for flatmates, and I have an extremely big amount on top of my summary. A related buggy experience is I have a standing order for the entire rent, however I receive deposits from my flatmates during the month. The standing order value is removed from left to spend and I am predicted to run out of money _ all the time _.

[anon32024031]

This is a must! It’s a step backwards at the moment in this regard from the old spending section. We’ve heard all the complicated ways people get paid etc… which aren’t being addressed with the current select pay date option.

Allowing people to set an overall spending target makes complete sense.

Especially as you’re carrying over money from the previous month in income.

I get paid a certain amount. I don’t want to spend all of it in a month and I wouldn’t like the spending wheel to work off my full salary in its calculations. I want to be able to set a smaller amount to target in the spending month so I have some left over.

Currently the only way to do this with the current system is to get paid into a separate account and transfer your spending into the account each month and then run your account to zero. Not ideal

[anon32024031]

Apologies just read this, you’re already on it, good work!

[Feathers (MikeF)]

@anon32024031

Currently the only way to do this with the current system is to get paid into a separate account and transfer your spending into the account each month and then run your account to zero. Not ideal

Or to transfer money out to a savings account somewhere.
Or to transfer money to a pot.

There are actually a few ways of achieving this effect even under the current scenario I’d Summary functionality. I do both of the above each month anyway but it seems to dovetail with the current ‘Labs experiment’ quite comfortably. If you want your ‘left overs” to sit in your main account, of course, then I can see there will be a problem.

[anon32024031]

Eventually I’d like to transition everything to Monzo and simplify my financial life. So I guess that’s my motivation for being keen on development of the summary screen.

I like my money to look after itself, so whilst pots will hopefully be able to take over soon, (there’s been talk of development since they launched) at the moment I can’t have direct debits/ transfers etc… automatically into or out of them. Everything needs to be manual. And I’m not sure, but at launch everything needed to be in £5 amounts with pot transfers

At the moment I use Monzo or day to day spending which I have a monthly budget for. My high street bank account handles the rest. But I’d like to merge them together, but easily keep track of day to day spending like I can with Monzo now. That’s what I envisage summaries being able to do

[Feathers (MikeF)]

The £5 thing went very quickly (tap and type) but the manual nature is still a limitation, I agree. I can work with it, however, on the promise that the automation will be there someday since seeing the Pots data in the app is just too useful. The byproduct is really the ‘amount left to spend’ falling out of everything else I’m already doing.

[nexusmaniac (Marcus, Backend Engineer 🛠️)]

@anon41842569

If you categorise an incoming Monzo-to-Monzo payment (anything other than General), it’ll credit that Spending category, but other income will sit within the Income section for now.

This is very true! But what surprised me (I noticed this today) is that monzo.me payments don’t credit the spending category.

I went to lunch today and paid, splitting the bill back at the office for ease One friend (now two! ) has Monzo so he paid me, the other two used the usual monzo.me link and I looked in my Summary tab only to see that the target was super low I clicked into “Eating Out” and there it was, the Monzo-to-Monzo was there as a green + but the the other two m.me payments were nowhere to be seen

I’d love to see these payments included one day! (Apologies if it’s been mentioned already, I’ve read so many Monzo posts this evening )

[anon5660699]

@anon41842569

we have enabled Targets within Summary on both iOS and Android () .

You’ll need the newest version of the apps for Targets to work.

I am running the newest version of the Monzo app on the latest version of iOS but I still can’t see it. Am I missing something?

[Feathers (MikeF)]

The button is top left of the Summary page where it always was on the Spending screen so I can’t see what else you’d be missing if it’s just not there. Force close and restart, perhaps?

[Trash (JoeO)]

@anon4700229

The summary page would be better if you could select widgets. Such as a widget which takes your remaining balance and divides by total days till payday. I do this anyway. But would love it to be part of the app.

Yep this is something I do too and I would love to see is as part of summary page somewhere.

[Trash (JoeO)]

A quick question:

I have to renew my travel pass every month here in Paris. This has to be done in the last week of the month.

What this means is that, although it has to be done even month, it is not done on a particular day. Is there any way that I can mark my pass renewal as a recurring bill so that it is considered as committed spending?

P.S. Loving the Summary screen so far BUT I am not sure how it interacts with the targets functionality. Do targets still have a purpose?

[redshift]

That’s an interesting form of recurring payment I hadn’t thought of initially. I’d assume we’ll be able to set payments as recurring, however, it would just assume it recurred on the same day of every month. Maybe there should be an option to set a reminder if the recurring payment needs to be completed manually?

There’s also Direct Debits which fluctuate in value every week/month. I wonder how those will be presented in committed spending?

[raysguy]

Glad you’re looking at this. I think trying to combine a financial overview with budgeting features in a single section is creating difficulties in designing an appropriate solution. If the Summary view was fully rolled out as is then Monzo would have lost all use to me as a budgeting tool. For me the main driver in switching to Monzo was to be more aware of what I was spending and try to gain some semblance of financial control through budgets so without that Monzo would have lost a key differentiator.

I think there needs to be a way of separating out the info to show both “funds available” and “budget remaining”. Both are key pieces of information and I don’t think it should be an either / or situation. Perhaps show at the top starting balance and total funds remaining because including starting balance in the figures as “income” is both inaccurate and misleading. Similarly, incoming transfers allocated to a spending category should offset that category as opposed to being “income”. For example, my mortgage provider collected £111 too much from my Monzo direct debit this month and then manually refunded via transfer. I assigned that transfer to the Bills category but it doesn’t show there so Summary now has my Bills spend as £111 too high and my income artificially inflated by £111. This makes the Summary quite inaccurate and unhelpful. Just like if I get refunds from Amazon and I assign these to the appropriate category I’d expect them to reduce my spend in that category as opposed to inflating my income figure.