You sure can - Power BI also makes use of the Power Query editor but I’m really not familiar with Power BI hence why I opted to go the Excel route!
Brilliant. I would like to be able to categorise a pot transfer. That way you can categorise the transfer as whatever you spent on your Amex.
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If you’ll always add the category, you could do it with a helper column and a bit of a work around.
Why didn’t I think of that! Definitely going to design a nicer looking background for my dashboard. Thanks for the tip
Ahem, if anyone has a super simple document explaining how to do basic dashboards in Sheets I’d literally pay for it.
£5.00 a month.
Lookin’ at you, Monzo 
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Not sure if this fits the bill for what you want (and it’s Excel rather than Sheets but for the most part the same logic applies)
But this site is a great resource for all that stuff: https://chandoo.org/wp/excel-dashboards/
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hi @BritishLibrary thanks for posting your review about exporting to google sheets. I don’t have Monzo Plus yet and thinking of upgrading just to be able to see data from all my bank accounts and cards.
Does data from joint / connected accounts get exported ?
I would like to see my exports from my HSBC credit card would that show up in the google sheet ?
thanks !
No, only your personal feed!
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Better categorisation functionality was why I signed up for Monzo Plus, but both custom categories and category splitting have been implemented in a way that limits their usability for me as a budgeting tool.
1. Updating category names
It’s frustrating that changes to category names don’t propagate to the Google Sheets export automatically. I’m guessing there is an infrastructural limitation that makes batch operations difficult as bulk category changes also aren’t supported.
A workaround is to disconnect and reconnect the export to your Google Account, which will create a new sheet with the updated category names. The manual CSV export also uses the latest names.
2. Normalise split categories into separate rows
I have a budgeting spreadsheet set up that relies on the transaction category and amount being in specific columns. This requires the export to represent transactions with multiple categories as multiple rows (with the same transaction ID).
I’ve looked into using formula to normalise the data in sheets, but it looks like a complex and brittle solution, so I’m most likely going to either go without category splitting, or write an App Script function to normalise the data prior to ingesting it into my budget spreadsheet.
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It’s a shame these features have such obvious rough edges. It makes me wonder whether the Monzo team use the product for budgeting themselves. If they don’t make improvements to the categorisation tools before my 3 month minimum term expires, I’ll likely move to another tool (e.g. Emma) and cancel my Monzo Plus subscription.
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I’ve just got plus to see what we the fuss is about, going to have a play about with it at some point and explore.
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Just curious, now that we’ve had auto exports for a while and some time to play around with dashboards, what proportion of your expenditure each month goes towards each category?
For me, my bills generally take up about half my monthly expenditure, food (both eating out and groceries) taking up around 30%. I use ‘family’ for big house expenses so the percentages are skewed on occasion.
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At a guess, probably similar to yours. But I will be building a nice new shiny chart to find out.
Interesting that you obviously have Plus but don’t use any custom categories.
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Yeah, you’re right. Couple of reasons for this. Vast majority of our spending is through joint account (which is what’s shown above in that graph) so custom categories are not supported.
For my personal account I had already established a lot of these graphs prior to custom categories so using them now might break stuff, plus I haven’t really found myself lacking a category. I find I can map spending by retailer if I want to see a more detailed breakdown.
On the topic of more detailed breakdowns. Here is a breakdown of my bills (the blue bit of the graph above) for those curious;
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I take it you’re doing a CSV export then for your Joint account, and linking it to your Auto data separately?
Yep, I occasionally email the CSV to myself through the app, then open it in gmail and copy paste the whole thing into a sheet in my master spreadsheet of doom. Within that master spreadsheet of doom I also have a sheet that automatically pulls in my personal spending from the auto export using the IMPORTRANGE formula.
I call it the master spreadsheet of doom as it also aggregates data on the following;
- google fit (i.e. step counts and locations etc)
- solar panel usage
- utilities (exported from octopus watch)
- car mileage
So in theory, I could look up any date for the past 5 years (as far back as 10 years for some of the metrics) and tell you where I was, how many steps I walked, how far I drove, what I spent money on, whether I had the heating on and how sunny it was. All super useful haha…
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I’ve gone slightly different because I have all the standard categories, plus another 15 or so and then it’s a bit of a mess with some on 0.4%
This will look vastly different tomorrow when my direct debits go out 
and some of them, I’ve spent more than came in, so those have set the savings to 1% just so it makes some sense.
New game!! Grow the orange!!
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Yeah, that’s the reason I’ve avoided using the custom categories (so far). For my circumstances at least, it wouldn’t be of any use to have a dedicated category for something that contributes as little as 0.4%. I find I’m better off splitting by merchant if I want to see that level of detail (like I’ve done on the bills breakdown chart above).
Still interesting though to see what proportion of your income you’re able to save each month. I think I could try to do something like that, though I might have to just manually put in a figure for our combined income. It also gets complicated as our pays go into our joint account, then we siphon a varying amount into our personal accounts each month. Will have to take a look at what I can do.
I probably need to improve mine as “spent” is a bit vague, maybe have a food one, or at least include that in bills.
Well I think ‘savings’ in this context is just the amount left over when you take all of your expenses away from your income. This is straight forward for a personal account with a single income. But its more tricky with a joint account with multiple incomes and outgoings that are not necessarily expenses (e.g. moving money into a personal account).
Oh and I think generally we’re not looking to make any predictions with these graphs, they are mostly retrospective (aside from some of my efforts to doing forecasting)
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