Making Monzo: Plan ahead better with flexible budgeting tools

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:

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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.

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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?

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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

Ta-da! :tada:

From today you can:

  • Choose the date you want your Summary to start each month, without selecting a recent payment
  • If your Summary is due to start on a weekend or bank holiday, you can tell us if you want to make it earlier or later
  • Track your spending in four week periods, because lots of you get paid every four weeks, not every month
  • If you set a custom period, you can ask Summary to start on the 1st of each month again

Let us know your feedback below.

17 Likes

Nice one! My budget has readjusted accordingly based on by pay day being the working day before. Good work!

Just set this to accurately reflect my payday (every 4 weeks on a Friday). Much needed. Thank you!

So I’ve tried to set this up (31st of a month, or if not, the previous working day) and I keep getting this red screen. Any reason?

PNG

Best update this year!

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Presumably if we set our payday as the 31st of the month then in shorter months, the app will default to use the last day of the month?

3 Likes

I think mine is broken? :see_no_evil:

I set everything correctly, I’m set to be paid on the last working day of each month. This month I will be paid on the 30th.

I’ve selected the 31st as my date and the working day before if it’s not a working day, yet my summary wants to reset on the 29th not the 30th - I thought the summary would reset on the day of pay, not the day before :frowning:

Apologies if I’m just understanding that wrong :innocent:

Screenshot_20181120-135033

1 Like

This is great progress. Hope that the weekly feature will be released soon.