Firstly, Monzo has been brilliant. I set out looking for an account which has the kind of budgeting features Monzo offers and cherry-picked Monzo, so to speak, as it is exactly what I was looking for.
A few suggestions to improve budgeting features:
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When receiving money from other Monzo users via Monzo’s ‘payment request’ feature, I have noticed that the incoming funds are added back into (and increase) your budget for the current month. This can skew the figures. Would it be possible to have the ability to exclude any such incoming amount from spending summary, the same way you can with purchases?
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Money received via bank transfer, on the other hand, does not appear to affect the budget for the current month. Can we also have the flipside option of being able to include incoming funds into the monthly budget (i.e. increase it).
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Can we have the option of splitting payments so that only a selected portion of a transaction appears in spending summary. At the moment, you can only exclude (or include) an entire transaction from spending summary.
When I’ve been buying things recently for myself and someone else, then receiving money back via payments requests and bank transfer, the numbers in the budget/spending summary are completely skewed. Some income is shown in summary, some is not, with no option at the moment to change this. And if you make a purchase of multiple items and you had already set money aside for half of that purchase (so you don’t want it to count for the current month’s budget), you cannot exclude half of the purchase from spending summary. When the other half is paid back to you by the other party, the income automatically increases your budget skewing the figures even more.
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When setting budget limits in categories, the overall spending budget does not change automatically. Can we have an option added so that if you want spending budget to be the sum of the budget limit in all categories, then it is automatically calculated?
I am going to assume this does not automatically happen as not everyone wants the figures to match - i.e. a higher total budget than the sum of categories so that there is a buffer allowance. Still, would be good to be able to click a button and have the figures match up, if you want. -
Committed spending: Monzo plus is automatically categorised as committed spending. Despite assigning it to ‘expenses’ or any other category of choice, it does not show as part of the month’s budget. Can we have the option to change this?
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I will also have another purchase which is soon to be charged to the account at 3 month intervals. I don’t know whether this will automatically be categorised as committed spending when the payment takes place, however; assuming it does automatically categorise the same way as Monzo Plus, then I refer to the problem listed in the paragraph above.
Assuming it is not automatically categorised and I have the choice of either listing it as committed spending of my own accord, or categorising it as you would a normal purchase, then the following becomes a problem: I would like this to be listed as committed spending because it will repeat every 3 months, however, I would also like it to be categorised and shown in the spending budget on the months in which the payments takes place. This option would be especially useful for regular payments/subscriptions which take place at varying intervals (other than every month like a usual direct debit) i.e. 2/3/4/6 month intervals. By including this committed expenditure in the summary, it enables users to visualise what payments are taking place in any given month, and can adjust their subscriptions accordingly so that they come out on different months.
Please ask if you would like any clarification on the above points as I am aware that is a lot of information.
Thanks.
some staff lurker takes note.