More categories for budgeting

[alexs (Alex Sherwood)]

Welcome to the community. This is a very commonly requested feature & one that is being worked on.

Here’s the thoughts of the Head of Design at Monzo on this -

https://community.monzo.com/t/custom-categories-multi-category-transactions/649/14?u=alexs

in the meantime, I recommend tagging your transactions using emoji -

@alexs

I’d recommend using emoji, rather than text to avoid typos & lower / upper character variations which will cause issues when you search for the ‘tag’, plus emoji are easier to spot when you’re scrolling through your transaction feed.There’s a emoji for example…but worst case #PP might be an idea (hashtags being the most likely prefix for custom tags if Mondo ever supports them).

I use emoji to group my transactions for spend on taxis so I can get to the total for Uber + black cab combined & takeaways .

Once you’ve tagged your transactions, you can just search for the tag in the Home tab’s feed, apply any other filters you want & you’ll get the total amount spend + average transaction value at the bottom of the window

Following on from this point -

@cbenn

Also the feature could allow users to say such category should be used for all future purchases from that merchant, ie auto at the moment would track Starbucks to ‘Eating Out’, I would recategorise to ‘Coffee’ under ‘Eating Out’ and want all future purchases at Starbucks to be categorised this way.

The challenge here is that you’ll use some merchants to purchase different types of items. For example, you might go to Boots each day to buy your lunch but if you’re visiting the store in the evening, you could be buying toiletries.
So the app already tries to be smart when applying categories, which sometimes causes different categories to be applied unexpectedly. The aim here is to get as close to zero manual editing of entries as possible.
That’s why it’s useful to get a notification for each transaction, it’s easy to go into the app & review the category. It’s not perfect but hey, the product’s still in beta.