I just made a purchase in an Esso petrol station which also has a Tesco next to it. I paid at the pump. Sadly, the transaction showed the merchand as being ‘Tesco’.
Does anyone have similar experiences? Would be good to have paying for fuel transaction attached to a separate merchand so that it does not interfere with statistics about groceries etc.
Just manually change the category of the expense from a grocery category to one relating to motoring and fuel.
No point changing it from Tesco to Esso as when you go into the shop and get groceries as many people do it would then wrongly come up Esso instead of Tesco.
It is a Tesco premises all be it with another brand’s fuel pumps so the POS machine is reporting merchant correctly (you are also paying Tesco for your fuel not Esso).
In this case the merchant data is correct as @anon44204028 says. The POS is in Tesco, it just has Esso branded fuel pumps.
There is another annoying case though: Tesco branded filling stations are always reported in-app as simply “Tesco” even though the merchant data is completely different, thus confusing the auto-categorisation and messing up any spending stats for that merchant. Last time I checked Monzo were unwilling to change this though.
I’ll have a look, but I was rather under the impression that all Tesco terminals carried the same data - I don’t think they distinguish between store and fuel in their POS data I’m afraid
They absolutely do. Tesco groceries report as TESCO STORES XXXX whereas Tesco PFS report as TESCO PFS XXXX.
The last time I raised this there was some nonsense response about “but people might buy milk and bread from the kiosk”, which is fine except that I’m pretty sure that the majority use of a standalone Tesco PFS is for people to buy fuel.
It’s certainly possible to tell the difference as my Starling account does show them separately:
It also categorises the Tesco spend as Groceries and the Tesco Petrol as Transport.
Would be good to see Monzo make this differentiation.
I guess the problem, @HughWells, is in terms of submitting merchant feedback via iOS is that there probably often isn’t a separate entry in Google Maps for the filling station. You’d have to revert to using the original Merchant Data for that I would have thought.
The following is a paraphrase of the answer I received from COps:
So the “problem” on the Monzo end is that the backend merchant enrichment service extracts a “merchant group” from the transaction, which in this case you can see is just “Tesco”, the same applies to ASDA groceries/fuel etc. This was basically done so that individual stores in chains would appear as the same merchant in the feed. It’s something that may be revisited in the future, but for the moment separating the merchants would be a ton of work and would rely on individual feedback for each store.
I still maintain that this should be possible even with the current merchant groups as in my experience every single standalone Tesco Filling Station I’ve visited in the last ~ 10 years, where its primary purpose was a filling station (i.e. not a filling station with a tesco express attached etc.) has appeared with an identifiably different transaction reference (TESCO PAY AT PUMP, TESCO PFS, TESCO UPT etc. as opposed to TESCO STORES).
Interesting you say that and I completely agree. I just connected my Monzo account with Emma App and all the transaction at Tesco/Sainsbury’s fuel stations are automatically tagged as transport, unlike Monzo. They may have already thought about the issue hence the better experience, I don’t know but their feed works a little better than Monzo’s own feed.
I’ve done that but nothing has been changed. Honestly, it should be automatical…
As above, the whole idea is to have a bank which does these categorisations intelligently and not have to waste time labelling transactions.
That is totally not relevant! The fact is that paying for petrol or groceries are two different things and they should be clearly seen in the feed as two different things. It is double as some people in the forum described. In general, let’s stop constantly giving excuses for Monzo…
In this case it depends entirely on what the transaction reference is. It’s probably reported as TESCO STORES XXXX in which case Monzo has absolutely no way of knowing that you just bought fuel and should categorize it as such.
If you buy petrol and or groceries from somewhere like Tesco the terminal will send a four digit Mastercard merchant code signifying the transaction type, and an abbreviated merchant name and location.
Where it is a large supermarket that will clearly indicate that it is groceries or fuel depending if you purchase in the store or the forecourt, however at a smaller Tesco with mini-supermarket and fuel they may be configured differently, and also one transaction is more likely to include both fuel and groceries (though these stores have a suprisingly high ratio of grocery only / no fuel purchases) so at some locations it may come up as groceries and in others fuel.
This is when the merchant name comes into play instead of the transaction type code.
Where the problem lies is I have seen some users transaction data where the original Mastercard data code does indicate a petrol station but it categorised by Monzo as groceries. I feel all purchases should be categorised as per the original Mastercard merchant name and code (not just one or the other), unless you as a user have previously recoded it into a different category in which case it should copy that.