Newly excluded categories are no longer applied to prior months in targets

Issue:
If I exclude a category within targets, it used to be excluded for all months. It now only works for the current month.
Newly excluded categories are listed in the non-excluded section of the breakdown for previous months, but when clicking on ‘edit’ they are shown as excluded within the ‘edit target’ dialog.
This applies to custom and built-in categories.

The reverse applies to categories which were previously excluded but then changed to excluded.

I’m fairly sure this is very new behaviour, perhaps since I tried out the new target-by-category feature.

Details to reproduce:
Go into trends, click ‘Target’
click ‘more’ in the ‘you spent…’ box
click ‘edit target’
click ‘edit’ within the ‘##excluded categories’ box
change a tick for a category (ideally which is used regularly)
click ‘done’, then ‘next’, click ‘keep spend steady’, click ‘next’
click ‘confirm no category targets’, click ‘confirm’, click ‘get started’
view ‘This month’ page - changes are present
view any previous month - changes are absent

OS: Android
Device: Pixel 5
App Version: 5.20.0

Screenshots:

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I’m having exactly the same issue, I cannot exclude a category from any previous months, the functionality only works from the current month going forwards.

OS: iOS 17
Device: iPhone 14 Pro
App Version: 5.51.0

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Is anyone looking into this? It looks a substantial issue affecting usability and experience as well as defeating the main purpose of having a Monzo plus account. Thanks.

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This is crazy. Can’t believe this hasn’t been fixed.

If I change my target, it only applies going forward and my previous months don’t show the changes!

Why would you want to change what you chose to report in the past?

Target changing to adapt to circumstances NOW and in the future is certainly needed - but the past is the past. No point in re-writing history now which will show incorrect historic findata :man_shrugging:

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I forgot about this post.

But you’re 100% right.

Not for new users, as a new user of targets, which is most people because most issues with targets were only fixed recently, you’d want to see your spending vs your targets for the entire year, not just going forward!

But if you’re a new user, you wouldn’t have any history to compare historical spending to a historical target?

Maybe I’m not understanding the issue properly.

A new user of targets with years of budgeting history in Monzo, there was a long period where budgeting became very messy due to poor integration of connected accounts. Therefore, budgeting reflects only Monzo spending historically, now with proper integration we can see all budgeting from the past but the targets are completely mismatched as we can’t retrospectively accomodate.

I see.

The actual problem then is that because the system did not work in the past, and you can’t backfill it to work, you can only use it from the point where it did start to work.

I used to use all manner of systems/services/sheets to log money - and stressed about how we’d spent it, analysing the past for hours. Not good for the mental health at all. Then I realised I only needed the entire history for a ‘what-was-that-for?’ enquiry from time to time. So we shifted our entire focus to be NOW only (current cycle) with a view to having an amount left-over which could be saved/invested.

Result: More time to do other stuff, less stress and better mental health.

It’s clearer to accept where you are now and have a plan to improve from this point, than to use a potentially negative history as a reference to help you in the future.

*Not financial advice, guidance based on my experience only, circumstances differ

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This is actually a good reminder. Thanks!

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