A design flaw is where a feature is awkward, opaque, or misleading, but it still performs its advertised function. Whereas a bug is where a feature is broken and does not perform its advertised function. Here the advertised function is: “schedule the money back into your account so it’s there when the Direct Debit’s taken”. That feature does not work. It is a bug. This is not semantics. It is very, very obviously so.
I’m not sure how winning this argument will help fix the bug problem for you any sooner, so I will (hopefully graciously) retire, just in case it does 
I just find it quite odd - report a pretty serious bug where payments fail, get told that it’s not a bug!
I agree, if you define a bug that way then you’re perfectly correct. Unfortunately, that’s not a definition of ‘bug’ that I (or perhaps we) recognise.
It really is just a problem of linguistic semantics but as I write requirements for part of my living, linguistic semantics can be really, really important (and can be fun in a twisted sort of a way).
At least we all agree it needs correcting.
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Enlighten me as to your definition of “bug”.
Remove the word ‘advertised’ from your definition and replace with ‘intended’.
We don’t know what was intended, we haven’t seen the design (so you could still be correct), we only know what was advertised after the code was written. Is the advert wrong or the code?
As I say, linguistic semantics.
(Swapping threads to carry on the debate is cheating 
but we are desperately off topic I suppose.)
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Intended behaviour: the money is moved out of your account on the date you select.
Intended reason: so it can then be used to pay a Direct Debit.
Potential problem: money is moved out of pot after Direct Debit is attempted.
Design: move money out on [date]
Reality: money is moved out on [date] but an hour or two too late
This isn’t a bug. The money is intended to be moved out on (date), and it’s moved out on (date). It’s only a bug if it’s moved out on [date]+/-X
This is a design flaw. It’s supposed to be available for covering DD, but it isn’t.
Two possible solutions:
- Adjust the timing so any money moved out of pots is done so before ANY outgoings that day.
- Change the guidance to “On the date before you need to pay them, schedule the money back into your account so it’s there when the Direct Debit’s taken!”
Whichever way you cut it, it’s not a bug. It’s a design error.
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As a software engineer, I can tell you that that is definitionally a bug. It’s a type of bug - and there are many kinds - but it’s still a bug. All flaws in software are unintended - if the developer had been aware of that particular edge-case, then they would have taken it into account.
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Here’s a guess. As per @glasgow’s comment above:
Standing orders and transfers (in Monzo nomenclature “scheduled payments”) - in a similar fashion to how you describe direct debits - need to go out after salaries go in (i.e. Bacs direct credits) so that there is money there to fund them. The developer who implemented taking money out of pots likely used all the same infrastructure - dispatching a job to the queue that runs at 3am. However, the developer likely forgot that a scheduled payment out of a pot operates more like a Bacs direct credit than it does a standing order - the user is being paid; it’s just that they are paying themselves.
I think that we can infer that the developer was quite aware that moving money from a savings pot into a main account was in order to fund payments; it has no other purpose. I replied here with my guess as to what went on.
My view, fwiw,
It’s a bug in the system. The software is part of the system. The software does what the software was intended to do. The bug is that the timings are out.
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I’ll be using this to automatically transfer my savings away into pots when I get paid to save some admin come payday. I’ve already tested this along side with some standing orders to my joint account… it went badly.
Until we can set these things to happen in line with salary recognition I’ll be turning it all off. As my normal payday of the 1st was a weekend this month, all these transfers and standing orders put me into my overdraft untill I was paid on Monday.
Pretty sure I’ve read about salary recognition on the forum in the past so hopefully won’t be too long.
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Scheduling payments into and out of pots is great!! There really needs to be options the schedule fortnightly and 4-weekly though!! This is one of the few main things that stops me using Monzo completely and changing over from my old bank!!!
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I want to set up a scheduled payment to move money out of a Pot into my Account but the system won’t let me because there’s no money in the Pot at the moment. Why this limitation? I’d rather be able to set up the transfer and have it take whatever was in the Pot if there wasn’t enough money to cover it - or if that’s not possible, have it fail. Have I misssed something?
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I don’t have this issue. I’ve set up withdrawals from pots when they have no money in 
An issue I’ve had this week, and why this feature is still only half-baked, is that setting my automatic pot withdrawal to coincide with a Direct Debit isn’t timed correctly. We already know that automatic pot withdrawals take place after Direct Debits, that’s not the issue (I have an overdraft so Direct Debits won’t fail in these instances).
What I do have an issue with is that scheduled pot withdrawals take place no matter what day of the week (like standing orders). Direct Debits set to come out on a day that’s a weekend or a bank holiday comes out the next “working” day. This means the pot withdrawal can come out up to three days before the Direct Debit does.
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I suppose ultimately, we never intended the feature to be used for this purpose. It was more a mirror to pot deposits that allowed for use cases such as giving yourself a weekly budget into your balance from a pot.
There’s a significantly better feature for this in the works that does tie into the Direct Debit cycle for just-in-time withdrawals, showing how much needs to be deposited to cover the next month of bills (still manual right now though), and so on. I don’t know the timescale for launch though.
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You could try setting money aside for all your bills by scheduling payments into a pot. On the date you need to pay them, schedule the money back into your account so it’s there when the Direct Debit’s taken!
That’s exactly how it was marketed though…
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We’ve been round this buoy a couple of times before…
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