Following up from our blog post last week about what’s next for the new look Monzo, we’ve added another small option to Monzo Labs while we design a full solution.
In the new app layout, the budgeting bar and ‘Left to spend’ figure from Summary are also shown on the Home tab. For some people this can be confusing or annoying.
We plan to improve how the different budgeting options work, how they’re introduced to people, and what the default behaviour is. However, in the meantime, we’ve added a quick fix for people running into problems.
If you head to Monzo Labs and enable Hide 'Left to Spend', the budget bar will only be shown within Summary. You’ll need the latest version of the app to do this.
We hope this helps reduce some friction while we take the time to explore more fleshed out solutions.
Just tried it, looks okay but the balance appears lower on the screen than the balance of other pots, it needs to be positioned higher up directly under “Current Account” as was previously? Hope that makes sense.
Would prefer I think the balance to come down a bit further - the gap looks too big in the standard form, in my opinion.
But on the whole it’s good - I like the idea about more of these toggleable customisations coming - makes the app way more flexibile.
What I think would be a good addition too to Summary is a mini tutorial on setting it up - I’ve had a Monzo account for ages - but broadly ignored Summary as initially I used it as a spending card, and then after going Full Monzo didn’t really pay attention to it, because I don’t categorise things, and now Bill Pots is here - I kind of want to utilise it - but I feel like I can’t trust it, because I don’t know how things in my account are affecting it.
Like it but I ended up disabling it again because I actually like knowing how I’m going. I initially didn’t like the budget bar being there on the new app, but I’ve got used to it now.
If I could change anything I’d like to show the bar but not the numbers above, so I can have a visual reference of my current budget status, but not the numbers
100% agreed, and this is why we added this toggle to Labs rather than putting it directly into the app to start. I don’t think ‘show/hide’ is the right solution long term.
I think there’s an opportunity here to clarify how the different options for ‘overall budget’ work, and introduce them to people properly - without defaulting to ‘automatic budgeting’ which throws lots of people off at first glance.
In my mind there’s three options currently, but they’re not presented as three options to explicitly choose between.
No overall budget (just show my balance and maybe total upcoming payments)
Automatic budget (this is the default behaviour now)
Manual budget
I think we should provide a clear choice between these, with each explained properly - most likely defaulting to ‘no overall budget’.
There’s a bunch of design work needed before we jump to building something like that though, so it’ll take a little time (and we might find it’s not the right approach!)
It took me a while to understand the behaviours of the automatic budgetting and realise it just won’t work for my situation (always thinks I’m running out of money because I pay all bills and get transfers from flat mates).
So I worked it out and set my own budget at it works great, but I always find it hard to remember how to get to where I change spending budgets. I don’t the find the icon for this on the summary screen indicates what it is to me.
Not sure where to post this regarding budgets but when it comes to setting a budget for next month is there a way we can click on the categories when on the budget screen and see what we spent the previous month - what would be really helpful. Also, can we adjust the budget by clicking and typing rather than the + and - symbols?! Thanks.
As mentioned by others, it would be great if we could select the account on which to hide this. Personally I only want the left to spend on my personal account, not the joint account.
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