To avoid the We're working on a new look for the Monzo app thread becoming too jammed up with conversations about Summary (and the Pulse graph), I thought I’d create a new thread to help @bruno, @JordanFish and team understand what we love (and hate) from those features - so they can either keep them or reinvent them in new and exciting ways!
(And no new thread is complete without a poll or two!)
What do you use Summary for?
Left to spend figure
Days left figure
The red/amber/green easy warning
Seeing the payday period (e.g. 29 Mar - 29 Apr)
The notch that shows if your spending is keeping pace
Seeing spending broken down by category
Seeing committed spend broken down by category
Seeing income all in one place
Seeing Pot transactions in one place
Seeing a list of upcoming committed transactions for the month
Something else (explain below)
It’s good for nothing
0voters
What do you use the Pulse graph for?
To help me find peaks in my spending
To see how often I’ve been overdrawn
To compare different months spending patterns
To go scroll quickly back/forward in time on my feed
I just like the look - it gives the app the wow factor
Categories don’t work well for me. I’d be vaguely interested in spending analytics that showed me how much I was spending at various places. I know that Summary is supposed to be more intelligent than that, but it gets so much stuff wrong that I find it pretty useless.
The Pulse graph looks good when it works (i.e. salary in at start of month, balance gradually going down through the month), but daft when it doesn’t (e.g. large amounts moving in/out that look like meaningless spikes).
Both of those voting sections imply that the dislike of those features (“It’s good for nothing” and “I hate it, just kill it”) don’t really give the impression that they are simply features that are of little or no interest to some users.
I don’t use Summary because, like the Pulse graph, it seems geared to regular income and outgoings, making budget planning useful. If you’re just randomly funding the account and randomly spending (or doing unpredictable transfers to and from accounts), that seems to mess up the predictive intentions of the budgeting tools.
So while they are “useless” to me, that doesn’t mean they’re rubbish, rather that they don’t apply to me. Maybe that means I’m not one of Monzo’s target customers, but it doesn’t stop me using the app as it’s basically become my main account for spending, and has essentially made me go 99.99% cashless.
Tracking which bills have gone out (wish it included scheduled pot transfers so I don’t have to manually add up pending pot transfers and subtract from safe to spend)
Spending by category
It was the main (only) reason that my wife and I switched to Monzo. I never look at my balance, only the safe to spend amount.
If Monzo remove the above functionality then I see no reason to remain with them and would probably go back to Starling where I used to achieve the above via their API. Summary was such a strong attraction that I moved even though I lost the free foreign ATM use and interest on pots that Starling gave me
Summary is useless (and a waste of time), to someone who uses a credit card as their daily spend.
I can see how it can be useful for those who do their spending through Monzo (which is evident from the other thread), but it’s a massive part of the app this is unused by myself.
I use Monzo for everything ( excluding savings) I find the graph annoying and the summary “dumb”( what I mean by dumb is it needs support from machine learning so it’s not as “dumb”.
It’s all about committed spend for me. Being able to see upcoming debits and a balance to spend has freed me from needing any other money tracking software.
Summary is an essential part of the app for me for budgeting.
I set a monthly budget for myself for the main circle, so seeing how much I’ve left, the number of days left and the colour of the circle all help me keep in track.
Then the category budgets, again, are all set so I can make sure I’m not overspending on eating out etc.
What I would like to see is the large monthly budget being calculated from the total of all the categories. So if I set my food budget to £100 and eating out to £50, the monthly budget is set to £150 automatically.
the best example I could give for it being “dumb” is that I had a transaction for a transfer for an ISA. I would have liked to be able to categorise it as an obvious category such as “ISA” but ended up having to categorise it as “Bill”.
My “dumb” issue is normally around the predictive part of the Pulse/summary.I find that sometimes it gets somewhat confused about what is going on. I.e a purchase that is being done once for example renewing my antivrius software. it would be nice to mark that as a one off purchase but also predict in a years time.
Alternatively, I think I look at the summary differently. I look at mine at the end of the month rather than the beginning. It would be nice to be able to automatically detect income and use that as a starting basis(Primarily so I could automate some pots for dividing for food etc via IFTTT).Then remove committed outgoings which could lead you to a total spend for the month.
This is where the ethics of prediction come in(Whether its a good or bad thing(Probably an entire thread on its own). I think some idea of clever prediction what I mean by this is giving a weighting(People have done it via an Emotional score I think a necessary score would be better)((Again another discussion) ) for a transaction for example takeaway at 3am on a Saturday morning(if you’ve been out before definitely necessary((At least in my view ). That would feed into some sort of Machine learning that could then more accurately predict what you are going to spend your money on and where you could make savings.
Another part of this (The wholly controversial bit would be) for your weekly food shop scraping deals online and then saying rather shopping here you could save money by shopping here instead)((Again another thread for discussion due to Data issues etc)).
I just think its current state, I could do it with an excel spreadsheet(which is fine).The more important bit is developing it as a tool(whether it needs to be complex or simple)(another thread) to help people get the most out their money whether that is saving for a big event or helping them get out of debt.
Importantly like everything ever created it needs to fit with people’s lives effortlessly. There is no point producing something complicated because people don’t have the time to learn how to use it.
Then I think the feature of, monzo that you’re missing is credit card transactions shown in app. I’d say the app offers very little other than pots for anybody who just uses their current account to pay off their credit card.
Although, if you have the cash at hand and use a credit card for other benefits than the credit you could still use summary. If you move the amount of each credit card purchase in real time you could still categorise the spend, if you could be bothered
But Monzo want to offer the best current account to a whole load of people, and whilst you’ll never please everyone, there will be thousands (if not millions) who put all of their spending on a credit card.
I use Monzo for the notifications and slick app.
There is definitely things they can improve on, and payee management is absolutely the top of this list (arguably, the most important aspect of a current account, minus the spending).
I don’t feel I’m missing out, because I don’t need the budgeting features. The fact I have to say what a payment is for is an extra annoying step I don’t need.
I’ve not signed up for the beta version. I normally do but Summary has help me budget and save since being #fullmonzo, something which I have struggled to do in the past with legacy banks. It helped me get on the property ladder, it’d be a shame to see if gone and by looks at the vast majority of comments on this and the other thread, I’m not the only one.
Theres a reason why legacy banks are falling to Monzo and Monzo is increasingly becoming a household name, when I sell it as a product, the summary tab is one of the main/first things I mention, I can imagine this is the same for others
Summary is nice for the category breakdown. But it still doesn’t work properly/fully for me due to salary payment, which is the last Friday of the month. If this was supported, it’d work much better (for me!)
Having to set it as the previous payment date, or the 1st, is a compromise and leaves a chunk of time when it is out, inaccurate, or just completely wrong.
I’ve a bit of a fix, but I’m going to stick to because of those annoying months where there’s 5 weeks between pay days:
On payday I shove £2k of my pay packet into a “salary” pot which then had a scheduled payment to empty it on the last day of the month. Anything over £2k goes into savings.
This means I’m artificially giving myself a £2k salary the end of each month and I can budget month by month rather than payday by payday.
). That would feed into some sort of Machine learning that could then more accurately predict what you are going to spend your money on and where you could make savings.