I’ve been a Monzo joint user for years and throughout that time I’ve been submitting Merchant details corrections for my @Ocado grocery shopping purchases (among other corrections) made by PayPal but it never gets corrected. I understand why it happens with PayPal purchases, It’s just really disheartening to see it never gets fixed despite submitting the correction to Monzo many many times.
It doesn’t recognize Ocado as being an online merchant so asks me for a real physical address instead of a website address. Perhaps that’s why it’s never getting fixed?
It’s a problem for me because grouping all PayPal together mucks up the categories since it only ever uses the last category that was selected, whether it was my netflix subscription (entertainment) or Ocado (groceries). It doesn’t even remember the category when they are repeating payments.
I have a feeling that PayPal (much like Curve card) are stripped from the merchant info to get the “true” merchant, but left as Paypal if a true recognised merchant was not found? I’m pretty sure that’s always been the case, but I’d have to search the forum as I don’t use Paypal myself.
I have one yesterday that just has PayPal in the string, that obviously says PayPal. One to ASOS has ASOSCOMLTD in the string but that still displays as PayPal.
There is never any merchant data in all of my PayPal payments. They just have the PayPal transaction ID in the notes field.
You can then use this to look on PayPal to see what it was for. But I just delete this and write my own note.
Out of interest why don’t you just pay with your Monzo card? Not only would it then display accurate merchant data but you also wouldn’t have to change the category every time.
@Ordog: It’s on a joint account and it’s not my transactions, they are my wife’s and she’s refusing to change from PayPal because it’s more convenient for her.
@tbutz / @Revels : I don’t think it is a big but I don’t think it is an intended feature either, at least that used to be the case. It did used to pick up the ‘true’ merchant for some PayPal transactions (e.g. PAYPAL *NETFLIX.COM 3531 4369001 LUX) but I suspect it relies on a developer/employee manually reviewing the submitted correction and adding it to a whitelist. But then in January, it stopped working so I guess this list got reset or they just stopped doing it. I would understand if it’s a manual process to keep up to date that it would be unsustainable. Though it was rather nice
I see different behaviour for PayPal payments to different merchants
The format of the merchant strings looks pretty similar, but sometimes they are shown as main PayPal account and sometimes as the merchant, though consistent per merchant at least
Obviously there is some difference per current algorithm
When the early 2021 sweep fixed some and left the main PayPal ones I settled for that
