I accept that everyone has different needs but, for me, that level of granularity isn’t necessary.
First, it’s a pretty laborious process separating the cup of coffee from your tank of fuel, or separating the alcohol from your essential supermarket food.
Second, and kind of related to the first point, I’ll never capture quite the right level of detail. If I note that I’m spending too much on take out coffee, great, but am I also going to separate out the coffee from my supermarket shop? No, I’m not.
If, as one of the other posters suggested, you want to know what your car is costing you, Monzo already offer good search features that will very quickly bring up most of the relevant transactions, and allow you to figure out the details fairly quickly.
Note that I’m not against detailed budgeting, and something like flux’s digital receipts has huge potential to automate a lot of this, but custom categories doesn’t tick any boxes for me. I would have preferred to see more stats on merchants (eg how often do I shop at X? What’s my spend there this week? This month? Etc) that could be easily automated.
I think I agree in terms of preference / priority. I’d much prefer to have powerful visualisation of what’s happened in the past than painstakingly curating categories.
At the moment i cant add my other current account (Danske Bank) even though their open banking apis are available in case anyone from monzo is reading this
I agree with this so far, but I do think that if virtual cards were linked to specific pots it would go a long way to make a more secure experience. At least then any potential breach would be then limited to whats in a specific pot rather than the whole account
For me where the power of granularity is important though is two fold:
it helps me action things I need to focus on. I like to separate certain types of spend so I can see where I am making choices. One mega “Personal Care” category doesn’t help me see I’m spending too much on clothes vs haircuts, for example.
And I agree i might not use it to the point where I will split my grocery shopping up into 8 categories, it does have its uses.
And 2) it means I don’t have to search so heavily for data with well categorised info. The Car example - it could be trivial to search for it in app, but having data analysis to show I’ve had to spend £X on unexpected car maintenance is easier to see at category level than transaction level.
That is to say, it is the aggregated analysis that is useful, and categories *make that more meaningful.
The missing link here of course is the analysis side which is missing really in Plus and relies on you making use of the data export, but this is the power to me. And that analysis needs merchant based analysis too.
(Also, in my ideal budgeting world… pots and categories can become the same thing - so I can be actively accruing money in my Car Maintenance fund and spending from it Through the year… but that’s a different rant from me…)
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Anarchist
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Actually, I hadn’t thought of that. I often have to hunt for a card when shopping online just to get the CVV.
Another solution would be to use a secrets store, something like LastPass. In addition to generating and storing complex passwords, it can store bank and card details ready for auto complete across multiple devices. All of that is available on the fee plan too.
It isn’t always as simple as this though. Look at the Ticketmaster breach for example. It’s a website that lots of people use, and would probably have considered fairly trustworthy, but they still had a huge security issue - and regardless of that, if you want a specific ticket it’s often your ONLY option to use anyway. There are lots of less trustworthy sites that the average person would still want to be able to use - websites of local takeaways is the obvious example that springs to mind. I could also imagine instances where you may wish to pay for something via a device that isn’t your own, where you can’t be 100% assured of the lack of malware.
Without virtual cards this was a gambling game and now it’s so simple to make it secure - make a virtual card, pay for the thing, then cancel the card afterwards. Sure, it’s not going to protect you against someone instantly charging you huge amounts, but most security issues with cards are not like that, anecdotally. It will be about someone getting and then using your card details later, or selling them on.
I was thinking that it’d be good to capture initial impressions, then come back later on when folk have had a chance to use for longer. But good call. I’ll change to midnight Tuesday. Edit: I don’t think I can without resetting the poll
most important “something else” feature for me would be joint account support. i.e. hopefully implemented like if both parties have plus, then the joint account is automatically a plus joint account too (otherwise if not, you can pay the usual fee to make it one leaving the personal one(s) as regular).
I like the new card design, but as other bank cards are shifting to a clean non-embossed front with details on the rear (Starling and Curve for example) then this plus-only design feels wrong. Why not do that design in the standard coral colour on regular accounts for those that want it.
I basically only upgraded to Plus for the custom categories so my vote goes to developing this further:
More colours and icons (ideally match emoji keyboard)
Reorder, nest categories and delete pre-set categories
Categories linked to pots/payments in a category coming from a pot
