Receipts, tags, search and export

Feedback & Ideas
1

After the BIG LIST I feel the thing missing the most from a young freelancer’s perspecive is a fully fleshed-out SEARCH/RECEIPT/TAG SYSTEM.

I’m a London based freelance film director, and I often need to manage multiple simple expense reports for my clients, for my business and for myself. I usually do those with Expensify (connected to my Visa) and the lack of good similar functionality in Monzo prevents me from switching to it full time, which I’d like to do very much.

All the tools you need are mostly already there, they just need a proper refinement now.

The goal would be to allow for:

-more powerful, refined search and management tools in Home feed
-more versatile attachment of receipts,
-better tagging,
-abililty to create Reports (like pots) akin to Expensify, which transactions can be added to then exported as a pdf report of expenses with receipts added (then deleted and forgotten when the job is done to declutter).

Receipts
Allow for receipts to be attached from emails/pdfs/files and attach them fully to exports.

Tags
“Categories” need to remain quite broad so that Monzo can match transactions automatically - something a lot of people on the forum doesn’t seem to grasp as a design necessity.
“Tags” however are a powerhouse of customised functionality and searches for everyone.

Flesh them out: make them fast and easy to use, i.e. keep an editable list of #tags premade by me that I can quickly tap on rather than having to type it every single time.
You could do it by having a list of tags unfold the moment I tap on “#” on the keyboard etc.

Search in HOME TAB
Improve search refinement and filtering tools:

  • manual scrolling through dozens of contacts/brands when refining search is a nightmare - allow for typing it in, i.e. when I type ‘t’, all brands/contacts not starting with ‘t’ already filter out from the list, making for fast searches.

  • give ‘Tags’ a proper search button and display a list of tags.

  • Allow searching for specific from/to dates

  • Allow a third export option: a visual pdf report of expenses format akin to Expensify.

  • Allow for either manually refining searches to create desired expense reports: i.e. search for all expenses from-to, then swipe to remove a few transactions I don’t want, to then export a Report from,
    OR
    Build in a proper Reports functionality: let me create Report called ‘Client/job name’ and just add appropriate transactions to it manually, then hit export to create a nice, simple pdf with receipts added.

I do realise you can’t be everything for everyone and have to choose our battles, but I feel you have such a potential and an actual UI that already ALMOST allows for all this, that not pushing it just a little further would be a massive waste of an opportunity.

Think of an entire generation of 30-something professionals and freelancers like myself who’d need nothing more than Monzo to do all their personal and professional finances from one place.
I think this is kind of your main target audience anyway.

Hoping to see this and with best regards - love your product #Monzo, well done so far.
Michal

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2

Great list! I’d add, allow us to tags all transactions on iOS. I do fair amount of bank transfers to friends’ legacy bank accounts, but can’t tag them at the moment.

2 Likes
3

Loving this, but could you expand a bit on:

I don’t use Expensify, so I’m trying to visualise this. Do you mean something like a smart playlist or folder, where you set some filters and the content dynamically changes to present anything matching them?

4

Yes, exactly that. Like a smart playlist/folder in OSx or like rules in an email client.

In expensify you can create a ‘report’ (basically a smart folder) in which all transactions/receipts you tag with the name of that report go; you simply tap a name of the appropriate report within each transaction.

So in Monzo I’d imagine similar smart folders, for which you could set some general rules if you want (example of rule no.1 for such report: vendor:uber from:monday till:sunday), but also simply add/remove transactions manually as they happen, to end up with the exact expense report you need (because on wednesday you could have used an uber for something that had nothing to do with the client’s project).

So you could create those in a multidirectional way, by:

  1. assigning a pot/report from within individual transactions, the way you do categories, receipts, tags and notes now.

  2. go to the home feed tab, perform an advanced search then batch select the resulting list and add to/create new report. Assigning a tag/category expenses for each transaction you will claim expenses for as it happens, would make results of such search much clearer once you get to it - you’d use tag/category: expenses to only display in the feed what you marked as expense to start with.

  3. go to within the specific report-folder and create set of complex search rules there. Then from resulting content list you could ‘swipe-away’/exclude individual transactions that made it through your rule/search but don’t actually belong (like that one-off mid-week cab home).

All this sounds complicated when you have to write about it in words and sentences, but once you grasp the concept it really is very simple, very powerful stuff.

Hope this helps

2 Likes
5

No, I get it - and think that Smart Pots would be amazing. For me, expense reports is a red herring (it’s not my use case) - but advanced filtering (and export to help with your needs) would be exceptional.

Who from Monzo do we tag to make this happen / add to the exceptional ideas board (if that’s still a thing?)

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6

Yes, smart pots is the key word here I think and the usage spectrum is very wide - it would be a great tool for a variety of reasons.

No idea where to put this, I don’t use social media and can barely use internet forums etc; please feel free to add/move/tag/etc this as you see fit Peter.

1 Like
7

One additional suggested idea to flesh this out, in case pots and reports were to be unified by Monzo for simplicity’s sake - since everyone will find their own personal ways of using them.

For each Smart Pot you create, you decide on its main behaviour, either:

  • a ‘report-type’ pot: referential aggregate report of transactions history (like an expense report), in accordance with its set rules; no actual money in the pot.
    Ability to export a nice, clean-design pdf containing this pot’s referred transactions with receipts attached as images.

  • or a ‘Physical’ pot - where actual money are being transferred from/to, in accordance with its set rules.
    Ability to export a transaction history specific to the pot (history of money in and out of this specific pot) with an option for a simple, clean-design pdf on top of the current ones.

I think that could cover a huge-spectrum of usage in an organic way.

1 Like
8

Who from Monzo do we tag to make this happen / add to the exceptional ideas board (if that’s still a thing?)

Hey @Coral-Crew, do you know what’s happening with the exceptional ideas board? I was keen to tag @.cookywook, but thought he might appreciate a weekend off! :wink:

(At the risk of repeating myself I think that this is a great candidate - and could really make tags come to life!)

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9

It’s still there, clearly, but hasn’t seen a lot of love in recent months I think. I know from:

that some form of further change lies in the future but I don’t know what that will look like.

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10

Thanks, Mike. I knew I’d seen something somewhere!

11

Any update on improved tag search and export functionality?

Doing another work expense report, and it would be great to be able to export a CSV of all of the transactions that I’ve tagged with the label for the trip.

1 Like
12

Bumping this thread again as I’ve just done expenses for another trip and would really find the following features useful:

  1. Ability to bulk tag in the app
  2. Advanced search operators (e.g. has #tag1 but not #tag2)
  3. Ability to see a list of tags
  4. Autocompletion for tags

Without these features I’m forced to export transactions to CSV and review / tag them on desktop as it’s too cumbersome on mobile.

1 Like