The distinction between “balance” and “available balance” is actually very important when charging interest on overdrafts or credit cards, and is something I’m pushing for Monzo to surface (for the readers at home, charging interest or other charges on non-finalised transactions is illegal as they can still be reversed or changed). Since Monzo only show the “available balance” (after authorisations deducted) this means that there are situations where you have no idea if/when you’re going to get charged overdraft. There are two situations I’ve come across where this has actually been an issue for me:
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Pre-ordering from certain international retailers. I’ve talked about this a lot over on Pre-ordering authorising the full amount months in advance and it’s interesting that CDJapan get 30 days of pre-auth while UK retailers get 7 days (I don’t know why this is).
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Double authorisations from Amazon UK. I’ve recently had issues with Amazon sending duplicate authorisations to my card where only the latter charges would get finalised, but I still have up to a week of extra charges showing that will never finalise. Since Monzo treat pending transactions as gospel, I had a negative balance for a few days and was not really sure whether I was actually overdrawn or not. I’ve been in discussion over email with Monzo about this and had the older Amazon charges manually reversed so I have a more reliable balance again, and hopefully the devs (maybe even yourself) will be advised that this balance and/or a list of pending transactions is actually quite important to be accessible for those who use an overdraft.
I hope that makes sense.
EDIT: Oh yeah, fun side note: Monzo obfuscate the “balance” when you do balance checks on ATMs as well. Both balances displayed on the ATM are the “available balance” after authorisations are included.