Managing Categories

We obviously need custom categories, however any category must be manageable. If a transaction is moved out of one category into a new category you need to ask if ALL transactions of that type AND in the same category need to be re-categorised in bulk OR is this a one off move.

Why?

So we can gradually get the categories to be meaningful to our individual lifestyle, which is obviously constantly evolving.

Hope you get the idea. If not please let me know if you agree that categories are one of the most compelling features to develop working budgets - but as yet they are very limited and delivered as one size fits all.

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Yep, they are fundamental to my money management, but they have to suit my spending (including split categories) which is why I prefer to use a spreadsheet to control my finances. Another advantage is that my spending isn’t limited to accounts which automatically categorise my spending, and it’s free in terms of cost, although there is a time cost so it’s not going to work for everyone.

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+1 for this.

Some simple ones would be adding certain categories like ‘Savings’ and ‘Hobbies’. Things like ‘Shopping’ seem to be a catch all which isn’t very meaningful.

I’d also like the ability to set rules, like ‘all transactions with this vendor are in X category’.

I’m sure having this type of flexibility would also give your data scientists a whole plethora of new data on how people use the categories, cause right now they are too inaccurate to be of much use. But keep up the good work as once it does become better I can see it being VERY useful!

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Another idea for me would be the ability to enter a description for each category; I can never remember if I put my “gifts” budget into shopping or general.
Even just adding a few more categories would help. Starling have 18, as opposed to Monzo’s 12, and there are key ones (Personal Care for example) missing from Starling.

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Custom categories has been requested for a long time now but monzos response vhas been less that luck warm. The idea behind set categories is monzo can collect and analyse our spending, to what end i don’t know but I can guess and I don’t like it.
To give us custom categories somewhat removes monzos ability to make any sense of it, incredibly useful for the user not so good for monzo.

I imagine that the analytics would be on the lines of “you have spent £X more on [category] than most [age bracket] in [postcode area]”, and similar comparison to other users spending.

I’m desperate for custom categories - I’d love it if I could use Monzo as a powerful budgeting tool - but right now it has many flaws in that area, lack of categories being one.

Personally I think my ability to track more accurately my own spending against my own goals and plans, would be more powerful to me than “community based” analytics.

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Custom categories would be good, but would we lose Monzo’s ability to automatically categorise things? I don’t want to have to categorise every transaction myself.
Personally I don’t really mind categorising things generally and then using #tags within them if I need to but maybe a few more predefined categories would be good.

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A compromise would be to allow custom subcategories. I guess that is the logic behind the tagging feature but it needs to be made easier to tag multiple transactions and pull up a view by tag.

One thing for me would be splitting amounts across multiple categories. E.g. my Amex bill payment where (for example) ÂŁ800 of it is expenses (matching the ÂŁ800 income from expenses repayment) but ÂŁ200 is general or holiday spending.

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I guess the difference would be that whatever algorithm assigns categories now would need to be based on your own history rather than global data?

But in theory if you always categorise particular retailers in a certain way, it should be easy to get it to remember that choice.

I certainly think additional categories and the ability to select multiple categories for each transaction would be very beneficial.

One category that is sorely missing is one for categorising Presents, ie gifts to others. It forms a fairly sizeable % of my outgoings and I have no idea which category they should be marked as.

Agree that ‘shopping’ is too crude. The example given above of a credit card bill is an excellent (and extreme example) of where having a single category for spending means the analysis provided by the excellent Monzo app is essentially broken.

What’s the point of all the analysis info if it is essentially impossible for it to even be close to being right?

I was just about to open a thread along a similar theme. I’m currently looking through my statements to help prepare my personal tax return and I’d really like to be able to have some easy queries to run which flag up all charitable giving, or let me keep an eye on yearly ISA usage etc. This would be made much easier if I could automatically assign tags to certain transactions, or even apply tags to transactions in bulk rather than for each one individually.

Agreed. I am frustrated by the categories - they are limiting for me. For example, I would like a category for ‘education’ for things related to my German studies, such as textbooks or courses. General is well, too general! I can’t even change the general category to something more meaningful to my situation. Or even a category for ‘gifts’ so I know when birthdays etc and holidays arrive, it can be categorized as being spent on other people. ‘Shopping’ doesn’t cut it for me. It just tells me I shopped and doesn’t let me split that out. Sure, I have a ‘Christmas’ pot but when I spend money, it doesn’t come from that pot directly, or show that it does, the whole amount has to be moved to the main account and then I have to categorize it as ‘shopping’ when ‘gifts’ would be more suitable so that I know what it pertains to instead of having to make notes inside the purchase every time. I want something I can see it at a glance.

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I might be missing something, but I am surprised there isn’t a salary category. Should I put that in general??

Also - can’t see how to Tag categories like the help pages say you can.

In the note area of the transactions you can tag it by doing a hash and then what the tag is.
For example you could tag your Christmas shopping transactions as #xmas and see them all in once place.

I think most people put salary in finances but whatever works for you

I must be being daft. Can’t find the note area anywhere!

Am on an iPhone X

Click on the transaction you want to add a note on, then there’s an icon to add notes and #tags

Tap on the transaction in your feed and then choose the add notes and tags.

Screenshot_20181221-230445]

The tag will apear beside the transaction and you can tap on it to see all transactions with that tag.
Screenshot_20181221-230525

In the 2 months I’ve been a customer and tagging transactions I never realised a little blue clickable tag appeared!

I always wondered what the point was :joy:

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And now I realise I’ve been adding notes wrong for months by not adding the hashtag so I don’t get the little clickable link under the transaction :see_no_evil::see_no_evil::see_no_evil:

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