Pulse and Summary are Dead - Long Live Pulse and Analysis!

If only @hugo had listened to us earlier :wink: . In all seriousness though, it’s good that this is being looked by Monzo and hopefully they do something similar to your designs!

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Challenge with scheduled payments in is that most (good) budgeting philosophies are based on the premise you can only spend what you have. So a red summary circle :o: until the second payday is annoying but in a philosophical sense absolutely correct.

Scheduled payments in would also need to be optional, those of us who have been YNABbers for a long time keep the money that’s come in this month to spend next month, so our child benefit for example goes into a pot and comes back into the main balance on payday.

How can the philosophy be correct. I know for certain what I will be paid and for certain when I’ll be paid it. I just want monzo to share in that knowledge and be useful which it currently isn’t.

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Monzo have said they want to do this kinda thing, but the issue is in the what if, what if it doesn’t come in? Then Monzo have told you that you’ll have more money than you actually do, and that encourages irresponsible spending, That’s the real issue here. If it doesn’t come in, Monzo have done bad instead of just not done good.

You could kinda argue the same thing about your salary though - what is that doesn’t arrive?

Ultimately, Monzo needs to give us the right tools - how we use them, and the decisions we make from them, are ultimately ours, surely?

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Monzo don’t predict your salary though, they only tell you about it when it’s bacs and know it’s coming the next day or two.

Oh I completely agree by the way and would love to be able to have predicted incomes, but I’ve asked about it a couple of times before and it seems this is the issue internally at Monzo as to why they can’t do it.

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I’d also really like this back. Such a shame that it went away!

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Kind of. Summary expects your salary at the beginning of the period you set, but it’s possible for the Summary period to tick over but no salary to be received.

More importantly, though, this has come about because Summary was built for a one user account, with the expectation that there’s one salary that comes in on day one of the period. I don’t think there’s a particular issue as to why this hadn’t changed yet - more about prioritisation of resources to build the thing, I’d imagine.

Great ideas, you put a lot of work into that! I had some ideas related to parts of what you have there, specifically the “discretionary spending”. I wrote about it in short and then rather longer, too. It would be great to see a better analysis of spending, breaking out items that are mandatory vs discretionary, modelling when a debt will be paid back, modelling when an item will be saved for (and being able to quickly re-arrange the order of these savings-funded future purchases in case we change out minds), and many other things besides. Hopefully Monzo will take some of this on board!

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But they predict outgoings, what if it doesn’t come out?

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Then you have more money than you were predicted, which isn’t detrimental in spending to the user. The problem comes with the system potentially encouraging people to spend money they don’t actually have.

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Personally I think an ML engineer needs to sit down with TensorFlow and create a model of spending habits…

Now you have two problems.

But we all budget with money we don’t have (yet). We don’t get paid hourly, we have a reliable income which is what budgeting is all about.

Hey i’m with you I’d love it to be more accurate and tell me what incomings are coming up, this is just what ive gathered from asking the question myself a couple of times.

Essentially, showing upcoming incomings could land someone in their overdraft if the income doesn’t come in and this would probably be labelled as Monzo’s fault. You can see it now, all the posts on the forum ‘Monzo told me I had 300 quid coming in and then it didn’t come in so now im being charged for being in my overdraft refund me or else’.

I see your point, they just need to make sure that people are clear when they enable this, assuming it doesn’t do it by default.

I’ve never really ‘got’ or understood how to use/why the graph is in the App. It appears to skew whenever a larger than usual amount is spent and it just rolls downhill. :chart_with_downwards_trend:

Whenever I go into the app I really am looking at the “Account Balance” and “Spent Today” numbers and then the “Summary” tab. :money_with_wings::money_with_wings:

I think there could be a better use of that all important real estate space on the “Home” Tab that the graph just uses up - maybe a bar chart that syncs with the Summary budget or maybe just an Income vs Expenditure for the month/ period since you were last paid/debited into the account? :bar_chart:

Would be interested to hear other people’s opinions! :grinning:

I agree I am not a fan of it. It looks nice but I dont understand the use of it really

If they added it to be more predictable so automatically predicted your salary and things like that but it doesnt

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Exactly! I think if it integrated more with the summary tab or just made a bit more sense (I could just be dumb and not seeing it for what it is) I think it would be really useful! Just seems a lot of prime real estate on the app to just effectively ignore…

It’s here because @hugo likes to torture @anon72173902 with not removing it :wink:

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