Salary Sorter / Simple Bank Expenses ✅

Simple user here. The expenses feature changed my life. After doing research online it looks like your Salary Sorter feature in the UK is very similar.

Do you have a plan to bring this to Monzo US?

Here is a breakdown of what I’m looking for:

-a way to customize buckets of specific recurring expenses (ie: hulu, car payment, rent, pet insurance, gas/electric, water, loan payments, etc). You can link recurring charges to them, set an amount and the day you need the funds by.

-on payday these specific buckets fill accordingly and the balance is hidden from your ‘available to spend’ amount.

-when these expenses withdrawal, they pull directly from their assigned bucket.

Please give us this feature. Let me know if you have questions. For some reason NO OTHER BANK has been able to mimic what Simple created. If you could do it I’d be a customer for life.

Thanks!

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+1

For now the workaround seems to be to create pots for these expenses and schedule transfers in and out of the pots on certain days based on when the expense is due.

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Yeah. I’m looking at having to manually set all of this up, myself. It is doable and more time-consuming. And where Simple refugees will probably really feel it is in the lack of flexibility from what we were used to.

And before I dive into this, I reaaaaally want to emphasize that when I joined Simple in 2016, most of what I’ve come to rely on was not there to begin with. Yes, I love it. Yes, I’ll miss it. But these features were rolled out over years, so we have to give Monzo time to make their own evolutions.

So, take your time.

But hurry up. :slight_smile:

OK. Here it is. Breaking down:

SIMPLE’S EXPENSE & SALARY SORTER ONE-TWO PUNCH

Let’s say that I have a bill that is due on the 21st of every month in the amount of $500. (I do, actually, but that’s beside the point, and it’s a fantastic round number to play with).

Current Setup

Setting this up with the current Monzo environment would mean that I need to set up a $125 draw per week (I get paid weekly) into the pot for this expense. This works perfectly for 8 billing cycles out of the year. However, since there are 52 weeks in a year and not 48, this means that for 4 billing cycles, an extra $125 will be deposited into the pot.

While not perfect, this works out OK. The extra $125 four times per year seems like a small detail, and it is, on an individual expense level. But as a reality check, I have 47 active expenses and 8 active goals, all on different funding deadlines. Some are weekly, some monthly, some bi-monthly, some semi-annually, and some annually. While I’m capable of tracking this, it is time-consuming and is exactly the kind of task that computer automation excells at.

Simple’s Setup

Simple’s expense/salary sorter is actually a two-step approach.

  • Step one is handled by the expense itself. The expense calculates the number of pay periods between now and the due date and divides that into the outstanding total.

  • Step two occurs when the sorter asks the expense what it needs, and then hands it over.

For instance, the ‘ideal’ scenario for the $500 expense I mentioned before would look like this:

  • I pay my bill leaving an empty expense.

  • The expense runs Step One and sees it that it needs $500 and that there are four paydays left between now and the next due date, and says “$500 / 4 = $125 per payday”

  • Payday comes along and the salary sorter runs Step Two and asks the expense, “how much you need, my friend?” and the expense says, “$125, please”, and the sorter drops $125 into the expense.

  • The expense runs Step One again and sees that now it only needs $375 to meet the $500 requirement and that it has only 3 paydays to make that happen. That is $375 / 3 = $125/ pay period.

This back and forth is what makes this combo so flexible and powerful.

For instance, let’s say, after the initial $125 dropped into this account, I realize that I have family visiting and am short for my groceries and pull $75 from the expense, leaving only $50.

  • The expense automatically runs Step One again and recalculates: I need $500. I have $50. I need to collect $450. There are 3 paydays left. That’s $150/ pay period.

  • So, on the next payday, the salary sorter circles back around and asks, “how much you need?” and the expense then says $150.

So adjustments are all made programmatically and are completely self-correcting. There is no manual sorting or recalculating required.

Another alternate scenario is that on the 4 times per year when there are 5 paychecks between billings, the expense would initially calculate 500 / 5 = $100/week needed. So, there are no overages in my expense after it is paid on the 21st.

:grin:

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@Aithene I’m curious if you’re still with Monzo and if this (or similar) functionality was ever implemented? I tried Qube for 1 paycheck (the app UI and UX is awful), moved to One for a year (was decent enough until Walmart got involved and they removed all of their features), and now I’m at Zeta which is OK and has a similar feature called Bill Reserve, but it’s not quite there yet.

Hi, Lament,

So, I am with Monzo, but I only have my personal account here. Not even being able to share pockets kind of made it a non-starter for joint-banking with my wife. Basically, I just buy my own clothing, pay for haircuts, and hide my anniversary present funds with Monzo.

Like, you, everything else is also over at Zeta. I agree. It’s not quite up to Simple’s bar. The only thing I can tell you is that last week, the CEO of Zeta tracked me down for this write up as she wanted to share it with her product team to mull over. She had seen it in the past and somehow remembered that I was the person who posted it. No idea where it will go, but I like that it is being considered.

If you cannot wait, DAS Budget does look really good. And there’s a bonus in that it can be used with multiple accounts, not just one. And the developer is supposed to be working at Monzo or something? But either way, DAS Budget’s integration with Monzo is supposed to be really good. If only you could joint bank with Monzo.

Ah, well.

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You’re gonna love this …

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That would be @while-loop!

DAS Budget really is a fantastic app. Would be a dream of lots of its functionality made its way into Monzo!

In the U.K., Monzo has a trends feature that comes real close.

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I saw that (right after I made my comment). After having recently set up our family finances at Zeta, I asked my wife if she’d be interested in testing this. And she really just doesn’t have the time or interest. So…

Here’s hoping the testing goes well. I’ll need to keep moving forward with my personal Monzo account until circumstances change enough that she’s willing to deal with more banks.

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Keep an eye on it! I hear that US joint accounts are getting fancy stuff like custom categories (sorry to break this to you, @davidwalton) and are moving forward pretty quickly!

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giphy

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@Aithene :wave: I was the Director of Product at Simple from 2014-19 and helped build all those things you loved - along with an amazing crew of developers, designers and researchers. Like you, I was crushed about PNC’s decision but we had a blast helping customers feel more confident with their finances. I joined Monzo in May, along with a fellow ex-Simple iOS developer, with a chip on my shoulder to do it again but better and that’s just what I’m going to do.

I can’t argue with the critique of how Salary Sorter works and I loved your pitch for how it could work. We’ve got some big ideas to automate how your money works once paid into Monzo so your expenses are covered, you’re saving up automatically for your dreams, and feeling confident in what is left to spend (on both individual and joint accounts). Keep an eye on our roadmap cause we’re putting the building blocks in place to enable that ideal future. I also will caveat that I suspect it won’t work 100% like Simple. Monzo, like Simple, is known for radically re-imagining what a bank should be and we’re not incline to simply copy from the past - there seems to be plenty of fintechs that think copy-pasting Simple will work.

DM me if you’d ever like to chat 1-1 about what you’d like to see at Monzo.

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Thanks! Can’t wait to see what you guys are working on.

This gives me the warm fuzzies that Monzo (UK) gave 5 years ago. It’ll be an epic journey to pull the US into ‘digital-banking’ but it should be possible and sustainable. I had experience of the US banking infrastructure a few decades ago and it wasn’t the best - a ‘challenger’ with enough passion and momentum might just help change it. There are a LOT of people out there wanting better.

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It really does! I have a lot of time for the US team and the way they’re going about things.

My one plea is not to over localize (Z because US topic). The UK needs a lot of love with things like salary sorter and where a whole bunch of stuff is just okay, but not out of this world - but which Simple reportedly nailed (cc @N26throwaway).

And a lot of the different approaches in the US and UK (like weekly vs monthly salary) actually really help build out each country’s edge cases. There are a whole bunch of folk in the UK who aren’t served well by Monzo because they’re paid weekly or four-weekly. And they’ll be US folks paid monthly.

Basically, this is me saying let’s do all the US specific stuff that needs doing (table stakes like ACH and checks) but then anything that can be shared both ways should be.

In case it’s not clear, I’m very excited about the different thinking and diversity that the US team are bringing to Monzo globally. :raised_hands: :monzo_usa:

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