Redesigning Spending

Anybody from Monzo like to comment on how holiday spending will work in the redesign? Looks like the holidays category has gone.

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They mentioned Holiday was going to be similar to expenses (9:00), so maybe you put it in Holiday mode (or it detects you are abroad and prompts it). Spending would then be Original Cat. + Holiday.

Hoping if that’s the case there is a toggle per transaction like shown for expenses (but only appears if you are in holiday mode).

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I think this looks fantastic, great job everyone involved, thank you for putting this video up. It really helps to explain where this particular feature is going, and creates a lot of excitement.

PLEASE PLEASE do a similar video for the pulse graph. I still don’t have a clue what it is for and why it is useful (and I think a lot of others are equally confused by it). At the moment there is just a lot of talk about how “it will be useful in the future”. If we could have some kind of sneak peek video explaining the pulse graph and where it is heading, people might be a bit more excited for it as well.

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This’d be more useful if the “spent” number was actually accurate. It’s always a lot higher than how much I’ve actually spent so I’ve stopped really even paying attention to it.

That doesn’t really make sense. Nasty bug if true though. Can you explain?

Thanks, Chris!

You might also be interested in checking out our recent Pulse Q&A. There’s lots of info there about the future of Pulse.

And for everyone else here, our most recent Monzo Insider was about user testing and redesigning spending.

Some more views of the above info from around 4:45 onwards.

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I can’t remember from when I watched the video in the original post, how are targets going to work in this redesign? Does the “left to spend” amount cover everything that’s in our account but isn’t in a pot, or is it based on a target? Are there still targets per category in this redesign; if so, how would we manage our “shopping” or overall target if we purchase a big item (like a TV) one month?

It’s pretty touchy about counting incoming payments against what’s been spent that month.

This looks very close to perfect for my personal needs. For me personally, targets have limited use.

I’ve had to calculate my bills (rent/utilities/internet) and set that as a target, then divide the rest of my monthly income into various other targets (£X for food, £Y for eating out - although buying a slow cooker has pretty much eliminated my pizza purchases :smiley: - etc).

What this means is, if I end up at Tesco to buy another round of ingredients for the next 4 days of slow cooked food at the start of the month, immediately Monzo guilt trips me telling me I’m spending too quickly for my overall target this month.

Getting rid of targets as-is and replacing them with this spending wheel would be pretty good for me :slight_smile:

If you’re already going to be tweaking categories and whatnot, I would love for you to allow splitting any individual transaction into multiple categories.

For instance, if I go to Tesco and buy a batch of shower gel, some TP and whatnot, a bunch of food, and some cider, I would want the ability to say “£X of this transaction was Groceries, £Y was Personal Care, £Z was Eating Out” (as I would probably categorise alcohol as Eating Out in Monzo terms).

In the month of February, I was about £50 over my monthly Groceries target because I spent around that much on one-time or non-essential purchases that should not be classed as Groceries just because it happened at Tesco.

It would be incredibly inconvenient if I had to make separate transactions so that I could manually re-classify an individual transaction as being Eating Out, Personal Care, Household and Groceries. Having to go through Tesco checkout four times in one day is a bit excessive :stuck_out_tongue:

To summarise:

  • I love the new Spending wheel, and I would prefer to have this over Targets (iOS user)
  • Please consider allowing transactions to be split into multiple categories for tracking spending
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yes. I’d also love this. It is really very useful, and surprising it not prioritised over the graph.

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I’ve just found out Starling have already added some of the key categories we’ve been asking for, Gifts and Charity being the most important to me. So this sneak peak with only two new categories has just become even more disappointing to me :disappointed:

At least if we had a Gifts category but not a Charity category, charity donations could technically be classed as a gift, but currently with Monzo, there’s absolutely no way to categorise buying a round, food, or gift for someone; other than the General category, which isn’t a solution.

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Hi Monzo :wave:t2:

Absolutely love your service, however I would really really LOVE IT if you could introduce a weekly spending breakdown as well as daily and monthly.

When I’m budgeting I find the best way to stay on track is to have a set budget that I want to spend each week and force myself not to go over that. Only knowing how much I’m spending on a daily/ monthly basis doesn’t hugely help me - so I end up having to still record my daily spends in my notebook.

Any chance you could introduce this feature in the near future? It would really be a lifesaver for me!

Thanks

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A fix is coming :soon: :slight_smile:

More details here -

What about non-monthly recurring payments? Got a discount on Spotify and a newspaper subscription by paying annually, which is quite common.

Ideally the UX would be encouraging me to put a 12th of these annual costs aside each month.

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Agreed, the Monzo categories are pretty limiting. I’ve sort of given up attempting to assign/keep track of spending via categories as they don’t have things like pets, gifts, internal transfers(to my savings account) etc and so a lot of my spending is now in the wrong category

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Yeh, this is a nightmare :frowning: transfer £150 to another account… You have spent £150 today!

Uhh, no I haven’t?

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Exactly, @hugo is there going to be work on categorising/sorting sending money to another account e.g savings account? It says you’ve spent x today when you haven’t, you’ve just moved it to another account?

A good example is you get paid, you want to move £500 to a savings account, so you transfer it to your legacy/savings account. However it now says “you’ve spent £500 today”, when actually you’ve not spent any of that money and have just moved it to a different account

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Resolving this would be one of the most important fixes for me at the moment. Last month I received a large cash bonus and transferred it to another interest earning account. As a result, my spending report for last month is incorrect, and the pulse graph for this month suggests that I will spend the majority of my Monzo balance this month, presumably because it is based on my “spending” last month!

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Its coming with the big Spending / Breakdown update :slight_smile:

That update is on the roadmap here & you can check out a preview of it here -

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