Making Monzo: Plan ahead better with flexible budgeting tools

Sorry for the double post…

I’ve just clicked through to the app roadmap online and seen that flexible budgeting has been marked as “finished” despite the initial posts saying this is just the start, with other options coming in the future.

Think I’ll add this feature to the pile of half-finished app updates that will never be looked at again or polished off. Disappointing really.

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Yeah, “finished” and “soon” have some wildly different definitions over in Monzo land.

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Hey @Jami :wave:

Appreciate there’s an awful lot going on at Monzo at the moment but I wondered how things are coming on with truly custom pay periods? I do love Summary but it’s not fit for purpose at the moment as I can’t chose a custom pay range. I get paid on the last Friday of the month. I’ve been paying in my salary since the current account was launched and have been patiently waiting for this update!

Any news on how this dev work is going, or whether it’s paused and if so, when it might be looked at again?

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Sorry to jump in but you may have missed, I asked a similar question a couple of weeks ago, Simon checked and found that there is no work currently happening in this area :frowning:

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Ouch. I did miss that.

Yeah, right now there isn’t a team focussing on the custom budget cycles. However, trying to improve some of the other budgeting fundamentals is in progress as part of the explorations into a new app structure.

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I appreciate that this discussion stopped about 5 months ago but noticing quite a few people have the same issue as me in that they are paid on the last Thursday (or Friday for others) of the month making our pay dates different each time and making the budgetting tool/summary useless. Are Monzo any further in developing this further? Has anyone come up with a solution of their own?

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I’ve not seen any mention of this being developed since this thread.

But I’ve also been asking for some form of roadmap and I hope this is on it because, like you, right now the budgeting tools built in Monzo are useless for me.

Hello!

So the last time I posted in here (a while ago!) I mentioned that budgeting fundamentals we’re going to make up part of the app restructure.

However, it’s now 6 months later the first big chunk of the app restructure has been released, but not many budgeting changes have come with it. The main reason for this was that the team needed to reduce the number of things changing at once in order to get things rolling, so focussed on the app structure and navigation, rather than specific features. We now have a clearer way to make a series of small changes, gradually over time (we really want to avoid too many giant changes).

The team I’m working on is taking a look at the feedback from the new app structure, pre-existing feedback around money management, as well was user research findings - and identifying the most important bits to improve next, now that the heavy lifting of the app restructure is done.

In my mind, some of the top candidates (in no order):

  • Better integrating budgets and category totals into the new app structure
  • Making sure when you categorise a payment, it ends up where you expect it to within Summary (especially incoming payments)
  • Simplifying ‘overall budgets’, ‘left to spend’, etc, and better introducing them to people
  • Updating how we treat Income and Committed Spending to better suit people’s needs
  • Letting people decide if they want their budget / left to spend to show on the home tab or not.
  • Adding some more frequency options for budgeting periods

I hope we’re able to start working through these improvements soon, bit by bit, without a big-bang all at once change. We’ll be sharing some sneak peaks and more regular updates soon.

Hope this helps!

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This is good, ‘new summary’:tm: is the next logical app improvement. Along with the initial list detailed above - yes, I’d like to see left-to-spend on my Home - I’d also like the ability to add future, manual, individual/recurring transactions which would allow Monzo to be an accurate-as-can-be forecasting tool. It’d need the ability to look forward in Summary to do this.

I don’t follow budgets as such, but prefer to see into the future to avoid any :train::boom:

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Do your plans include budgeting by calendar month, but receiving a weekly salary? I know it’s a hard problem, but it’s not an edge case either.

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So can we assume from this jami that custom categories will be quite a while away?

Can’t say for sure!

All I shared is the key problems from my perspective (one also very biased from working on Summary originally) - the research/planning/prioritisation is still in progress, and there’s a few different teams thinking about budgeting-related things at the moment, so custom categories might be a thing!

One thing I would say - in my opinion, I’d want to fix the issues with categorisation in Summary before introducing custom categories, as it would only make things more messy. The main things I’m thinking of is inbound Faster Payments not being able to credit Spending categories, not being able to distinguish transfers between accounts from actual income and spending, etc.

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Not explicitly, but we’re aware of it as a need.

I’d been keen to understand how people with that set up make use of some recent additions like Bills Pots, Salary Sorter etc before jumping to build some fancy income predictor within monthly budgeting periods (that’s how I’ve seen other services handle this, predicting income makes me nervous).

One approach I could see is:

  • You’re paid weekly
  • Your bills are monthly
  • Bills Pots work out how much you need to set aside each week, to cover all your bills
  • Each time you’re paid, Salary sorter helps you set aside that amount into Bills Pots
  • You use weekly budgeting periods for your non-bill spending management.

But that’s just a rough idea in my head.

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That is pretty much exactly what I’m doing - except for the last bullet, obviously, as weekly isn’t an option in Summary.

Cool, good to understand your model. Thanks for sharing!

Budgeting is a really tricky space - I think one thing I’ve learned since working on it is that it’s better to provide simple, less-opinionated tools that work well with each other - rather than try and create a mega-feature that solves all problems in a super-smart automatic way.

I think we have the raw materials of what we need to make this really amazing, but it’s always going to be a slower and messier process compared to other features, due to the diversity of how people earn, spend, and think about money.

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To be honest, I get more use out of Money Dashboard’s Planner feature that lets me plot all my recurring and future one-off transactions on a graph showing future balance.

If you could just lift that feature from them wholesale and hope they don’t notice, that’d be ace.

Same here - except for the last point also. My/our process is currently;

  • 25th - Salary 1 (paid via BACS on 26th but claimed early at 4pm on 25th) is received into our joint account
  • 26th - Salary 1 is sorted to put £xxx into Bills Pot
  • 27th/28th/29th - Several Bills paid from pot
  • 30th/31st - Salary 2 is received into our joint account
  • 30th/31st - Salary 2 is sorted to put £yyy into Bills pot
  • 1st onward - Several Bills and Subscriptions paid from pot on multiple dates

Currently, Summary always incorrectly shows that we’ll run out of money between Salary 1 & Salary 2 being received. It would need to look forward (using historical data) to predict Salary 2 arriving to correctly calculate the Left-to-spend accurately within the Summary period.

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Are you able to share a (non-sensitive) screenshot?

I’ve played with Money Dashboard, but it helps to see real usage (if you do share, please do hide personal stuff!)

A change I’d like to see is “Holiday” and “Expense” categories getting removed and replaced with toggles. That way you can keep track of your “Eating Out” spend while on holiday etc.

I think there was a WIP a long time ago on a monzo blog (see below):

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