I get the whole thing you’re driving at but I have to say this is so niche I can’t see it ever having a huge demand. If it said pending vs cleared that might be a start.
And I would never want it to not show in a budget category until it had cleared, the FD app does this and it’s super annoying.
I used to take pride in reconciling every single transaction across all of my accounts/savings/investments/assets in YNAB on a daily basis. Control-freak-ey. Then I suddenly realised it meant nothing and was actually a total waste of my time.
Yes personal. Business will have function in accounting software, personal doesn’t. 3-way match is an AP internal control, bank reconciliation a completely different cash process - in business terms its a vital control but not really relevant here.
Primary purpose here is to stop ad-hoc manual payments from misrepresenting your outstanding budget for the rest of the month. Essentially a quick visual check on scan that all transactions are either automatically reconciled [not hitting your budget] or have been manually reviewed to ensure they’re not effecting your budget summary.
I used to think by manually reviewing (and reconciling) every single transaction, offline/manually (often with multiple finance-logging services), with every credit/debit entity I had, I was retaining control.
Far from it. The time spent doing it was - quite frankly - insane, and just not really applicable in real life. Even with other-level-automations applied.
So with a bit of help from external influences (MrsW, JuniorW’s) in the form of ‘if you don’t stop spending hours looking at receipts and bank statements, we’ll [insert gruesome death threats]…’ I stopped. What changed with our finances when I stopped? Absolutely FA, other than I wasn’t wasting that time.
But tbf, Monzo Trends has become a real player in the quick ‘Are we on track?’ check, so I’m currently a big believer in Trends for that reason alone - I do think Trends will become a huge planning/future-looking tool for many and I’d be happy to inject experience to help develop such an important financial tool.
I think I sort of get why that might be useful, now, but this seems like something trends should do in the future perhaps?
Having a filter which only shows purchases that would form part of your budget with an additional line which shows overall spend. So you can see “at a glance” how much of your spending was planned/unplanned?
That would actually be a really cool feature, I would vote for that.