Making Monzo: Plan ahead better with flexible budgeting tools

Plan ahead better with more flexible budgeting tools

Status: Coming soon!

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Customise Summary and outgoing payments so it’s easier to sync up your finances and your spending dial makes more sense.

Update 20/11 - we’ve launched these changes!

https://community.monzo.com/t/making-monzo-plan-ahead-better-with-flexible-budgeting-tools/50782/21?u=cookywook

Update 19/12 - @Jami has shared some more details on our planned improvements

https://community.monzo.com/t/making-monzo-plan-ahead-better-with-flexible-budgeting-tools/50782/112?u=cookywook


Let us know what you think below!

20 Likes

This is a brilliant (and essential!) feature.

I get paid on the last Thursday of each month, so it’ll make Summary far more powerful and relevant if it changes on that same day as payday.

4 Likes

This will fix summary for me. At the moment I can’t rely on it because it’s not accurately tracking.

How long till we see this in Labs?

4 Likes

Could it be smart enough to detect a large incoming payment from my employer on-or-near a certain date? They usually pay before weekends but very occasionally after.

3 Likes

Brilliant! I get paid every fourth Friday so monthly budgeting tools don’t work for me. Can you give us any idea of when you expect to roll this out?

1 Like

This is perfect for me who is paid on the last working day of the month. At the moment I can get by with the current summary but this would just be :ok_hand:

2 Likes

@Naji Looks great. But what happens if it’s the amount that’s variable, rather than the date? For instance your income is part monthly salary and part quarterly dividend? Or you work for a period, and then have a period of downtime when you pay yourself from savings? In the former you can’t credit a pot directly, so it messes up the budget / spending summary), and in the latter scheduled pot withdrawals also mess up the summary!

i really hope being paid on the last working day of each month will work with this :blush:. I looks like it will but not quite clear from the above images e.g. would you choose 31st even though some months have less days?

1 Like

I think you should choose 31st and the worrying day before option from screen 3 but that’s just a guess.

1 Like

Hey, thanks for this. I think I understand the question, will try my best to answer.

Summary is oriented around making sure you have enough money to make the payments you need to make within a certain timeframe (currently each month). If the money you have each month changes due to fluctuating income, this will be reflected in how much you have ‘Left to Spend’, rather than how often your Summary resets.

I’m not sure I understand the issue with not being able to credit a pot directly, as pot deposits are automatically excluded from the Left to Spend calculation, and dial, and if you withdraw money from a Pot, your Left to Spend increases.

If your paying yourself from your savings, the change Naji shared at the top of the thread should help, as you’ll be able to line up your Summary month with when you pay yourself each month.

I might have misunderstood some of your points, let me know if so!

:bow:

8 Likes

Very interested in this update. How will my payment terms work. I get paid on the 25th of every month. If the 25th falls on a weekend it’s the last working day before.

Presumably select 25th and the working day before option from screen 3.

1 Like

Any updates as to how this is coming along?

For clarity, here’s the problematic setup:

Incoming to Monzo:

[1] Minimal Salary | External → CA → Pot | [monthly]
[2] Dividend       | External → CA → Pot | [~quarterly]

Transfers within Monzo:

[3] Gross spending | Pot → CA | [monthly]
[4] JA spending    | CA → JA  | [monthly]

The Minimal Salary is less than the monthly spending, and so is augmented by part of the dividend. Dividends aren’t clean and regular like a normal salary, but just about everything else in the world expects things to be monthly, so some extra steps have to be taken in order to “smooth” out the income - namely shove it all in a pot and then use scheduled pot withdrawals.

So, in that context, salary [1], and the dividends[2] show up under “Income” as “Transfers”, even though they are immediately sent on to the pot. On months where there is a large dividend, this is wrong. And on months when there is only the minimal salary, it is also wrong. The pot withdrawal [3] shows up under “pots” - there’s no way to assign this as “Income”. The transfer on to the JA [4] has to be manually excluded and assigned a category, but still counts towards the sparkline graph at the top, and the bar charts. Here’s what my charts permanently look like:

dividend
This shows a month where a dividend comes though. Meaningless. Ideally the amount in the large green graph would be credited directly to a pot.

spending
Here’s the monthly spending graph. Now, while it’s literally true that this is what happened, it doesn’t really reflect the larger reality - that the pot money shown in grey was always earmarked to be park of the green bar. So it just perpetually looks like savings are being burned, whereas they are actually delayed income all the long. The amount in the small green graph would, ideally, also have been credited directly to a pot.

sparkline
This one is probably the worst. This is what I see at the top of my screen permanently. It is both wrong and constantly shown, which gets pretty irritating!

Some suggestions:

  1. Enable crediting of pots directly - like in any other bank where you just have an account number and sort code. Pots are nice and all, but they’re not feature-complete - here Monzo is actually playing catch-up with the incumbent banks.
  2. Enable transfers from pots to the joint account. This prevents a bunch of empty, noisy feed entries, and also prevents the summary from being distorted by these movements.

What do you think?

5 Likes

@duncang

Me: :exploding_head:

If pot account numbers and pot-to-JA transfers were implemented then this would reduce to:

Income➜Pot   ।   Pot➜CA   ।   Pot➜JA

:exploding_head::heart_eyes:

Speaking of flexible budgeting tools - any plans for more flexibility on Category names, or sub-categories?

1 Like

For me, it would be more useful just to have a nice clear calendar of outgoing payments per day for the month so I know when to put money into the account.

Wouldn’t it be better if that was done automatically for you? Seems like a lot of work to me.

Not sure if this is already the case or not - are future scheduled transfers to pots taken into account for “left to spend”?
They also don’t appear in “committed spending” which while accurate, misses some part of the picture as this is money that’s not to be spent this month. Are you planning on adding a view that will sum these “committed savings (?)”? It could be super useful.

Thanks a bunch for all the work. :slight_smile:

2 Likes