New Targets feature now live!

[tristan]

Launching Targets: Our New Budgeting Feature

[alexs]

I think the design of this feature is great!

I just have a couple of questions about how the targets work -

• As Tom’s mentioned, user’s tend to spend more at the weekend than during the week. Does the calculation for the green / amber / red indicator, take that into account (this matters more for months with 5 weekends, rather than 4) or is it based on user’s spending habits or just the target divided by number of days in the month?
• If I change my targets from one month to another, does that app remember what my targets were for the previous months? Obviously I wouldn’t want to be up / down against a target in a previous month because I’ve adjusted my target for the current month.

And can we see a preview of the spend report?

[fashburner]

Awesome! Hope I’m not the only one who gets genuinely excited whenever I see a Monzo App Store update.

Couple of things though, I really like it, but:

1. At the moment I am yet to spend anything on “groceries” - so despite having a target for it, it just shows a grey bar which is a bit unsightly in my opinion - I have 100% of that target remaining to spend, so I think you should make that green, irrespective of the fact I haven’t spent any of it yet.

2. Similarly, I have only set targets for certain categories - I.e. I don’t have bills on my account yet so no point targeting spending there. I have targeted travel, entertainment, groceries, eating out and general. But when you look at the spending screen, they are all jumbled up based on a standard order - in my mind, what would be great, is if Monzo could shift the organisation of those categories so that if you have a target set, they are at the top (as obviously these are the areas you are most interested in), possibly ordering by biggest target to smallest.

[Dunsford]

possibly ordering by biggest target to smallest.

Or enable us to move them up and down the list according to our requirements?

[spencerldixon]

Been waiting for the Targets feature for a while now and love the implementation!

As I get paid in the middle of the month, my spending tends to run mid month to mid month rather than beginning to end how targets is set up. Will there be the option to set your start date for targets?

[iansilversides]

Targets

Hi there, First of all apologies for not sharing too much design stuff lately. We've been focused working on ways to optimise user on-boarding: the period that goes from the day you sign up to the waiting list to the magic moment when you get to love Mondo and use it for all your daily spending. So, as you are all already Mondo-lovers all that work doesn't really matter to you :wink: Let's try to compensate our radio silence with a meaty and very very wordy sneak peek. This is an update tha…

section 3, 1st image, 3rd one along - gives an indication of custom target dates at the bottom of the screen - this has been asked for on the forum quite a lot so would imagine its coming

[alexs]

Great spot

It took me a while to find the image Ian’s referring to so to help anyone else, here it is

[iansilversides]

you’re much more adept at tech than me

[Timjacko09]

Is the name of this a little counterintuitive to what budgeting is about? I wouldn’t set a budget target (something to be aimed at) rather I would set a budget cap or limit so that I don’t exceed it. I understand the premise and will use the feature but maybe need to rethink the name/language used.

[Dunsford]

Or enable us to move them up and down the list according to our requirements?

Look at how Clear by Realmac Software works to see what I mean (it’s a To Do app)

[hugo]

Is the name of this a little counterintuitive to what budgeting is about?

Fair enough, probably the more sensible name would have been “budgets” or “limits”:

• The problem with the word “budget” is that tons of people feel strongly against it (boring stuff, legacy banks, something that doesn’t work…), it reminds me of the “diet” in “diet Coke”.
• “Limits” on the other hand makes sense but talking with users we’ve seen that some people expect the limits to be “hard” limits. So, if you say your limit is £30 your card will decline after that amount… which is not what we want to build right now.

So that’s why we went for “Targets”. It’s a Monzo concept that in the future will expand this functionality and make things far more interesting that just limit spending.

I hope it makes sense

[Timjacko09]

Certainly makes sense and good to know different names were thought of.

I suppose it’s all about mentality and language, a target is something to be aimed at (and potentially broken), a cap or limit is something not to be exceeded and to me that’s what budgeting is about. E.g. I know I have £xx amount of disposable income, that’s my limit. I don’t want to refer to that as my target as I would like to ensure to come under that.

In fact I would normally have a savings target (or goal) sooner than a spending target or goals.

Maybe it could be budgets as the feature with limits for each category, which could change month on month depending on people’s budget.

My other slight concern with the idea of spending targets is the issue of responsible finance. Given that Monzo are trying to get a banking licence, how would a regulator look at the idea behind “targets” considering that again it may give the impression that these are speanding goals to be reached? Would they look negatively on the fact people can set goals that could cause overspending, overdraft, etc? I may be overthinking the whole thing but it’s just a further point to consider!

[hugo]

Fair point. The good thing is that the name itself doesn’t matter that much if you think about all the communication cycle. Notifications and onboarding explanations are very clear about how the feature works. It’s always the user who is in charge and we alert them as they get close to the target.

Additionally the loop closes every month with a report that celebrates when the user manages to stay under target and encourages them to improve when not.

I might be wrong but I think it’s a good balance towards spending responsibility.

[dc.robertshaw]

It would be awesome to be able to group catagories into one target. I have 3 targets, ‘groceries’, ‘eating out’ and then what I call ‘left over’.

‘Groceries’ and ‘eating out’ are set each month and ‘left over’ is my money left after those two budgets and regular bills. Be ace to be able to put travel, shopping etc all under the ‘left over’ target.

Cheers!
Dan

[drthanwho]

I’d would be nice if Android users could also try this features

[imaginedd]

I also cringed a little when I saw the phrase targets to be honest. I know it’s just language that doesn’t matter in the face of the actual development functionality but I would personally love to see a switch in the logic and language where some spending goals count down and others count up,

i.e. Savings should count up to 100% (you’ve only saved 60% of your monthly goal, why not make a deposit now) , whereas Entertainment should count down (you’ve spent 80% of your entertainment budget, chill out its only Tuesday).

In that sense I’d want it to be green/red at different points. For savers it should start red and go green. For spenders it should start green and go red.

[fashburner]

Hi everyone,

So I’m really enjoying the targets feature, while I might not necessarily be saving much money yet, I’m definitely a lot more cognizant of what I’m spending, and the monthly reports are really useful.

I did have one thought, apologies if this has been picked up on other target based threats, but I think what would be useful would be some way of almost “un-targeting” specific items of expenditure.

For example, if I set a budget for the month of £1000, spread across my categories, I don’t want random transactions going through my account to mess around with that. In terms of what I mean by random, let’s say one of my friends wires me £50, that I then send on to my girlfriend (because my friend didn’t have my girlfriends bank details and owed her money, plus my gf and I both have Monzo cards – so it’s super easy to do). In my targets, that would count as a £50 expense, and one that Monzo would prompt me to categorise into the various categories, but obviously it’s not part of my budgeted spend for the month, it’s just part and parcel of moving money through accounts in the easiest way possible. So some way of clicking into that individual expense on my home feed and “removing from targets” would be useful, otherwise to cancel it out I’d need to adjust my “target” and increase it by £50, otherwise technically my target would have £50 less available to spend for the month – hope that makes sense.

Similarly, now in the world of Monzo.me and in future bill splitting, while probably way more complex for Monzo to try and implement, I think splitting bills should be treated in a similar way. Let’s say I had dinner with 5 mates, the meal comes to £50 and I pick up the tab. If we later split the bill 5 ways, my targets should note a £10 expense for my personal target, not a £50 expense.

Also, probably not the right thread for it, but I had another thought in the future land of split payments. It would be really cool if you could manage a “kitty” through Monzo. Obviously this is on the basis of most people having a Monzo account at this time, but it would be pretty cool to somehow link accounts for a specified time (stag do, sporting occasion where people take turns buying rounds for a big group all day) – invariably at those things some people end up paying more and some less (frequently on purpose…) – it would also take the faff out of someone owning the kitty and continually collecting cash from people – everyone just pays on their Monzo cards, and any transactions are evened out at the end of the day.

[beningreenjam]

No apologies necessary, but yes it has been covered. I mentioned it here

Monzo.me

After having received some genuine payments from friends, my only bit of feedback not already covered would be to allow for the payment to be categorised. My real world use case for this has already happened. I've made a deposit to a restaurant to cover myself and friends deposits in total and this payment is correctly categorised as Eating Out. They've repaid me through monzo.me but because I'm not able to re-categorise the payments from friends and therefore my Eating Out target for the mont…

Just adding it here to tie everything together.

[RyanNile]

I think Targets should be renamed Budgets… just a psychological switch but I’d rather stick to a budget than aim for a spending target. Know what I mean?

[Naji]

Definitely Ryan, Hugo explains our thinking behind the decision to use the title Targets here quite well

Fair enough, probably the more sensible name would have been “budgets” or “limits”:

The problem with the word “budget” is that tons of people feel strongly against it (boring stuff, legacy banks, something that doesn’t work…), it reminds me of the “diet” in “diet Coke”.
“Limits” on the other hand makes sense but talking with users we’ve seen that some people expect the limits to be “hard” limits. So, if you say your limit is £30 your card will decline after that amount… which is not what we want to build right now.

So that’s why we went for “Targets”. It’s a Monzo concept that in the future will expand this functionality and make things far more interesting that just limit spending.