Monzo Monthly Update: May

@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?

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:

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.

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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It’s true that we’re not yet in a cashless society, but doesn’t pretty much all (if not all) cash that’s withdrawn get spent on items that fit under all the other categories? If someone is categorising their eating out under the Eating Out category, why would they want to place one of those eating out transactions under a different category (e.g. one called Cash) simply because the payment method for that eating out transaction was different?

For me the limitation comes down to Monzo not allowing us to split cash transactions into multiple categories because ATMs don’t usually let us take out less than £10 but sometimes I only want a pint in a place that doesn’t take cards for less than £5 or something. The solution to that would be for Monzo to allow us to split either just ATM transactions or all transactions out into different categories.

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Exactly. Hashtags are my current half-way house.

But until then it’s going to personally irk me so see Cash conflated with transfers/savings/investments under Finances. I’ll just manually recategorise ‘Cash’ withdrawals to ‘General’ going towards.

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I think the point here is that, like transfers, cash withdrawals themselves are not “spend” - you simply move money from your account into physical cash. It should, therefore, not be included in the spending summary - same as a transfer. If you do pull cash and then spend the lot on one thing, then you can recategorise it.

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This is true for me too.

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I think this is where the disconnect is. Cash for some is “petty cash”, i.e. used to buy bits and bobs. Get £50 out on a Monday and it’ll just be spent on “stuff”. Cash for others is as you describe it. “Going out for the evening so I’ll pick up some cash”, hence you know that it’s been spent at some event.

Neither is wrong, just different ways of doing things.

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I would like the cash label back as well. I’m glad they added finances - I can categorise money that goes into my ISA, etc, that way. I’d like to be able to distinguish that from petty cash I get from the ATM.

When I fully move to Monzo (just waiting for smarter pots), this will become even more of an important way to delineate transactions.

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Out of interest how would you then use that information - what action would you be able to take based upon it?

Like with every other category, it’s the ability to understand spending. It will be great to track how much is going into investments, etc., but I think it’s a shame it came at the cost of losing granularity about cash withdrawals, rather than adding to it.

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