Real-World Budget Use Cases

Feedback & Ideas
1

I’ve been using the budget feature to try and have a better understanding and control over my spending lately, and it’s really great.

I’ve noticed that there are some use cases which are currently not supported and some others which could be improved in order to ensure the accuracy of the budgeting tool. In my case, most of the problems I’ve been having are related to splitting bills with non-monzo users, although maybe they apply to monzo users too, but I haven’t had the chance to use any form of bill splitting with monzo users yet.

While I understand that bill splitting with non-monzo users is tricky, I’m not trying to solve that problem but rather to find a way to ensure the budget is adjusted to take into account those situations. These are some of the cases which are currently not covered or could be improved:

  • When I pay a bill and someone pays me back to a non-monzo account or with cash, I can’t tell the budgeting tool to consider only a specific amount for the bill instead of the whole amount.
  • When I receive a payment on my account and assign it to a specific category, the spent amount is never adjusted. This one is particularly bothering me as it should be relatively easy to implement and would really help get most of the budgeting inaccuracies sorted.
  • When someone pays the bill and I have to pay them back. If I pay them through Monzo, I can assign the payment to a specific category and it works just fine, but it would be great if it were possible to somehow link the payment to a specific merchant so that the statistics are still kept (amount spent on a specific merchant).
  • Finally one which is not related to bill splitting. When I pay for something using a credit card (or even a different account) because it’s a bigger purchase, I would still like to be able to use the budgeting tool to account for it, maybe it could be solved by adding bills specific to the budgeting tool which don’t appear in any statements. I understand this one is slightly unfair, but until Monzo comes up with their own cashback credit cards there’s really no solution for this. Loans aren’t an option as I usually pay everything back before any interest kicks in.

Just to clarify, I am an android user so I’m not sure if any of these apply to iOS.

7 Likes
2

Fully agree with this; in fact I’m fairly certain after the new summary was put in that this is how it worked for a while and then seems to have stopped working. I would say that if you receive an inbound payment (payment from bank, monzo.me or moved from Joint Account) then if you leave the category as “General” it is not included in the summary but if you assign a category then it should offset that months spending.

Edit: checked on the summary working correctly in June and it seems that the difference was actually that monzo.me transfers offset outgoings when they are categorised but JA withdrawals and Other-Monzo bank transfers do not. Added screenshots to the bug:https://community.monzo.com/t/payments-assigned-to-category-arent-reflected-on-budget/46786

I’m also on Android so I’m hoping that this is fixed in the new bill-splitting currently in Labs on iOS.

I’m not sure that everyone would agree with adding items that didn’t actually go through Monzo to the spending summary. I also encounter this situation you’ve described and I workaround it like this (actually for all of my credit card payments):

  1. Pay for items on CC
  2. Make multiple payments to CC using Monzo card (one for each category of spending I want to assign in Monzo)

This means that my Monzo summary is still reflective of my spending habits but I can benefit from rewards on my CC.

In addition to your list I think the summary needs:

  • If you pay for something before a summary period starts (i.e pre-payday) and then receive the split payment from someone else after the summary period starts (i.e. post-payday) that you could choose the summary period to include it in so that looking back at the period in the future would be more reflective of your actual spending.
  • Tracking of monies requested in the summary tab in a separate section (like the committed spending section) that are requested either through bill splitting or monzo.me.
1 Like
3

I would agree with all of these - pretty essential to call bill splitting/budgeting a polished feature. It’s more of a demo of what’s possible at the moment.

and one more thing

  • the ability to split up a bulk incoming payment into the different IOUs it covers. I use splitwise to manage my bills and my housemate will pay me back once every couple of months a lump sum that covers gas, water, washing up sponges, meals out etc.

basically monzo works very well for what’s going on inside monzo, but needs to be better at covering external transactions neatly.

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