Monzo Life Hacks, Extensions and Improvements!

[Peter_G]

So Monzo has been in the UK for a while now! During that time, we’ve amassed a whole set of life hacks, workarounds, complementary apps and ways of extending the Monzo experience. And now it’s time for the UK users to give back and curate a list for new US folk as you begin your Monzo journeys! And it’ll also help us out to have a list of these all in one place!

So here we go! If there’s anything missing, folk reply with it below and I’ll add it in! US (and UK) folk, hit us up with any questions about how these work and we’ll try and help.

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Custom Pots Images

Need custom images for Pots? Head over here and create your own!

Monzo Pot Image Generator

(And here’s the GitHub link)

Created by the wonderful @rknightuk

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Adding Notes to Pots

You can’t add any notes to your Pots. But a screenshot of your Notes app used as your pots image will fix that:

Add notes to pots

[image] I tend to write down my budget for each pot in my notes app, screenshot it and then set it as the photo on my pot. I was wondering on what people thought about adding either a notes section in the pots or a notes feature on the photo.

h/t @Michalalaw

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Automatically move money to a pot every time you spend on Amex: (Android Only)

If you use Amex and IFTTT, you can quickly set up a couple of recipes to move the value of every card transaction to a pot:

Richard Lartey

h/t to @giloi on Twitter and @simonb for reporting it on here.

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Use more than 50 custom categories

• Find a category you need but don’t use every day.
• Tap “remove category” - that will archive the category and not change any of the previously labelled transactions
• Create your new category

When you need to use the old category:

• Follow the steps above to archive another category
• Find the category in a Trends and tap on Edit (top right)
• Tap “Unarchive Category” at the bottom.

It’s super clunky, but if you have categories you want to keep but only use rarely it’s helpful.

(from over here)

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Sync Monzo to YNAB

From here, you can roll your own…

Getting Started

… or you can go for a hosted option:

Connect your bank to YNAB | Sync for YNAB

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Monzo Dashboard

Created by our very own @Revels, here’s a Google Docs dashboard that you can use to interrogate your Monzo data…

Monzo 'Dashboard' - Add your own data

Here goes nothing… I can’t keep adding bits or trying to change things. Get things get shipped or whatever that motto is. I’ve tried to make a template that is broad enough that it should give some form of insight into something. I hope so anyway. Link - Please save a copy First things first, you need to save this template as your own. File > Make a Copy – Save it where you wish You’ll need to get your data. You can either download the CSV and paste this in, or you can use the Google Sheets…

`* in the workaround sense, rather than cyber vulnerability sense

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Das Budget

A US exclusive! Das Budget is a budgeting app created and supported by Monzo’s very own @whileloop! And it plugs directly into Monzo’s API so it’s as live as live data can be. If you know how Simple used to do Budgeting, you’ll be familiar with Das Budget already!

DAS Budget

(UK folk, the app kinda works for us, although the currency symbol is hardcoded to $ rather than £. You can’t hook in external accounts, whereas in the US you can do it with Plaid. But most importantly, it’s not on the UK app stores, meaning we can’t download it. Or pay for it. Never mind!)

[davidwalton (Award Winning Hot Coral Analyst)]

Bills Pot & Salary Sorter - How much to transfer?

Quick tip - if you have a fairly regular monthly/cyclic amount needed to pay the bills from a Bills pot, let’s say for example you need to put £1,000 into the Bills pot to cover the monthly/cyclic bills - rename the Bills pot to ‘Bills pot - £1,000’

Then when you get paid, use Salary Sorter (where available) to move funds to the Bills pot. But how much to sort? - Never fear, it’s in the title of the Bills pot!

I keep renaming my Bills pot to account for any changes…

[Peter_G]

Here’s another one (someone else mentioned it on here, but I can’t find it to give them a shoutout - if you know who it was - or it was you - let me know so I can thank you!)

Want to see an external account that won’t connect to Monzo?

Create a pot with $0 / £0 in it, and use the pot title for the name of the institution and the account balance. E.g. “Apple Card: -$1327.78”. You could even take a screenshot of the other account’s app (if that’s allowed) and use it as the pot image…

(Very hacky, but a roundabout way to have the info all in one place).