Hi. Complete Monzo Newbie here - so completely happy to be told not to be so stupid, of course you can do that.
I was sold on the idea of having individual pots to manage my spending, as this was something i was doing with a previous account - just with the help of a spreadsheet.
However, I seem at every stage to be hitting limitations in the entire platform to the point where i’m seriously considering giving it all up as a bad job and going back to my existing provider. It just seems so poorly thought out.
In particular:
I seem to be unable to categorise incoming money by reference. I want to be able transfer money in from another bank account, say, with the reference “Petrol” and have that money be moved automatically into my “Petrol” pot. I don’t want to have to keep an eye on what’s coming in and manually move it to the right pot
I can’t seem to make a bank transfer from a pot straight to another bank - it looks like i have to move the money manually to the main pot before i can transfer it. That’s exceptionally poor. It requires me to perform 2 transfers on every occasion rather than 1 and actually makes the flow of money more obscure rather than more simple.
It seems that when you perform a bank transfer, the saved destination contains the ‘reference’ field and there’s no way to change this at transfer time. That means if i transfer money to someone else, I can’t use the reference field to identify the purpose of that transfer. Not having this available seems like a massive step backward from the capabilities of even the most basic of the other banks out there (and i’ve tried a lot of them) The few that used to be this restrictive updated their systems many years ago.
Sorry, but right now i’m wallowing in deep disappointment and my plans to move most of my money management into monzo are completely on hold
Overall it seems your problems stem from the way you want to use the account - which is to have lots of bank transfers in, automatically send them to various pots which have lots of bank transfers out.
You are right that Monzo isn’t really built for this and it likely isn’t going to work for your use. Unsure if there’s another bank that will support this idea better though.
For 3, i go into 'payments/pay someone/select a previous recipient from the bottom of the page. There is no option to change the reference on that page.
i put in the amount and select ‘review payment’ and there’s no option on that page either.
The only button left is ‘confirm payment’ - are you saying the option to change the reference is after that point?
(Note - UK version of the app in case this is different in the US)
Being able to sort incoming transfers straight into a pot based on the reference is an idea I personally love and would like to see. It’s a feature that’s been requested a few times by folks.
The same is true for being to transfer directly between pots.
I wonder though, have you considered Chase?
Their approach to banking sounds like it’ll be a much better fit for your workflows. Instead of pots, they give you actual accounts with their own individual account numbers. So you’d be able to transfer petrol directly into your petrol account. And similarly you’d be able to transfer directly between any of those accounts. And when the time actually comes to pay for your petrol, you could assign your debit card to that account for that transaction, and it’ll be taken straight from that account.
If you can’t easily perform transfers in and out of a pot, both manually and automatically, i’m currently failing to see how it’s much use to anybody. It just currently seems half baked
I’d even seen it, but because there was no indication on the right like an edit button, i didn’t register it as an editable field - much appreciated. At least that’s one big frustration sorted.
This has caught me out a few times since it changed (fairly recently). I think it’s a step back from the old system as it also no longer seems to remember the old references I’ve used when paying a particular payee.
