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
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
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.
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
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!
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.
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
I found this thread after some researching because I was annoyed with this behaviour as a new Extra subscriber.
So in my case, I subscribed to Extra just a day or two before payday, and was still tweaking trying to find what my target should be, which connected accounts to include, and which categories exclude. Switching personal accounts vs. bank account and readjusting things manually was a little tiresome, but generally a good way to track the spending habits and compare them to past months to see if the target is realistic or not.
And in a day or two later, the month rolled over, and now my past targets were set in stone, forever. There’s no way to confirm if I my further tweaks makes sense against historic spend to efficiently track my spending, and what hurts the most is that I can no longer see the targets against for the joint account (I can see them for the current month, but be careful to switch back to the “correct” set of accounts, categories and targets before the month rolls over again).
So, while the “past is in the past”, it makes it for a rather frustrating experience as a new user of Trends and I would urge you to review this, or let the users decide what they want to see.
