Monzo Monthly Update: May

Monzo Chat News & Updates
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May is here! And so is this month’s update :eyes:

https://monzo.com/blog/2018/05/01/may-update/

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Nice post @bea

Looking forward to this month! :slight_smile:

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Sweet, sounds like a decent month to come.

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Just as a general rule of thumb… how much is user demand taking into account in terms of the timeline? Like how did things like tags seem to jump the whole trello board process to being complete within a month when it wasn’t asked for or needed. Frustrating to be honest

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I think tags was a really simple “feature” to add. Because functionality was already there. You could always add comments to your transactions and they were always searchable. This is mostly a rebranding of a less known function so that more people can benefit from it. #because #people #like #hashtags

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I’m looking forward to being able to delete payee’s!

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Just noticed that the update on Coin Jar has been shifted back from ‘tomorrow’ (i.e May 2) to ‘soon’. Obviosuly taking a bit longer than expected… :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Yes, was confirmed once Slack… could be next week, they are waiting for a Pots Milestone.

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@hugo @bea can you better explain why Monzo renamed ‘Cash’ to ‘Finances’, instead of just adding Finances as a new category? By renaming Cash you’ve essentially ‘removed’ it and therefore ‘renaming’ is misnomer.

So my real question would be why did Monzo deliberately remove Cash :dollar: as a stand-alone category?

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I don’t understand, you can still use this category for cash, it’s still there. Is this causing a particular problem for you?

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Cash (i.e. banknote withdrawals) is a totally different thing to finances, and we see it should be in a separate category.

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How is it different? I’m pretty sure that the definition of that term / category is subjective & up to you to determine :slight_smile:

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Why not get rid of all categories except finances as that covers everything finance related. Simples

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Cash is something you withdraw for a purpose such as groceries, haircuts, taxis, etc and Finance is transferring money between banks or repaying loans or leasing agreements etc. You can lump them together, but equally you could put them (or anything else) in general. Having more specific categories enables a more refined split of expenditure and hence more accurate budgeting

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Exactly, the Cash category never made sense to me since you were always going to spend that money on Entertainment, Eating Out etc. So if you want to see where your money was going, you’d choose one of those categories.

Now the category actually has a purpose, to use to bundle & ignore transfers that don’t actually result in money being spent :boom:

But you could of course continue using Finances for your cash withdrawals & nothing else, if that’s important for your budgeting. In which case, the only thing that’s changed is the label.

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The ideal is to be able to split a transaction (a la Microsoft Money) so if you take £200 cash you could mark £50 for groceries or shopping, £50 for transport or motoring, £50 for travel or holidays, £50 as general or miscellaneous. Then any cash category would not be needed.

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Yeah..but we don’t have that option right now.

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and nobody has suggested or requested it since Mondo days :wink: I am sure it has been mentioned a few times, but still no sign of it, perhaps until competition introduce it and then Monzo will realise the need.

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lol very funny! I think we both know that they’re aware of it but..priorities.

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I’m not asking my question for the sake of it.

  1. The explanation for the category name change simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny: We’ll be renaming ‘Cash’ to ‘Finances’, so you can see when you’ve transferred money between bank accounts and not see when you’ve withdrawn cash from your Monzo account.

The part in bold is what I added because @bea @hugo conveniently decided to miss this part out. Monzo have clearly made a conscious decision on this that hasn’t been explained in accordance with their transparency guidelines. To me, I’m left to think this is a subversive move by Monzo to nudge me away from cash use given it is a cost to them.

  1. This finances category in place of cash is a loss of granularity for me. Cash and transfers are distinctly different. For one, cash is physical and transfers are electronic. I don’t want to now have cash fall under the umbrella term of “finances”.

I manually add tags, notes & receipts to my cash line items that I budget for so cash ATM withdrawals are never recatergosied by me manually, no matter what I spend it on.

  1. Back to the main point being that Monzo could have added the “purposeful” Finances category without removing the Cash category. They didn’t even consult users by the looks of it (if anything the “general” category is the one that should have been renamed as I personally find that useless. We are not yet in a cashless society. It’s premature to remove the cash category without good reason.

Having said all this I do like Personal Care a lot and Family moderately so. So it’s not all criticism from me but I would like to hear the rational behind the “label” change if I’m to continue placing trust in Monzo.

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