Like a lot of people, I spend a fair amount of time in the pub. I do enjoy this but would like to monitor my spend with a view to reducing it.
I understand why the merchant code for pubs and bars is defaulted transactions to eating out but is there any way we can have a Drinks category?
I am currently using hashtag #drinks which is a workaround but I can’t define the period for a search. This means I can’t tell how much I’ve spent drinking in any given month (and no way to set myself a limit etc).
I know categories are a big topics of discussion and tags introduced to play a role. I just imagine that there are loads of people like me who want to know what they are spending on drinks and think this could be v helpful.
Thanks for all the hard work in Monzo towers. Hope this can happen.
Sadly not. Android. We need anti discrimination laws for us! Haha. Thanks v much for letting me know that feature is in iOS. Still think having only one category for drinks and eating out a bit weird. Surely for anyone under about 35 (a lot of the user base), drinks must be a decent proportion of spend?
I’m 29 and drinks aren’t a major spend for me, but I’d agree they probably are for the majority. Tags help to create your own categories, and when Android get the beefed up search it will help a lot more.
I’m still in the camp of let the user have their own tags.
Be interesting to do some user polling on the categories.
If tags could pre-fill, have easy selection or ‘learn’ those would encourage me a lot more.
I would imagine a lot of this in the development pipeline but would love to know how realistic. I guess I’ll wait for the android update firat, fingers crossed.
I honestly think everyone wants more categories, and then be able to pick the ones they use. Even if there were 1000 categories, but only the ones you have used would show up.
But of course, ‘smart’ tags would be great, and would probably get over that. I have a transaction every month that is set as recurring, but the tag doesn’t get added every month, I have to fo it manually. That sucks.
Just to be clear - the smart search in it’s current format won’t be coming to Android, because it’s actually quite buggy and broken and only works in the intended way some of the time.
We’ll be rebuilding it on both platforms hopefully next year but it’s not super high priority at the moment!
With regards to the main question, could you not categorise drinking under entertainment if you don’t use that much, or perhaps a separate category that you maybe don’t use at all? A little bit hacky but it could do the trick.
Thanks. I appreciate the reply. Understood on both of those points.
I use entertainment for stuff like gigs/cinemas/theatre. Basically everything leisure that isn’t eating out or drinking out. Again, this is the sort of category that I want to monitor, set a target for and if possible make savings on. Don’t massively like the idea of putting drinks under something like personal care (which I use fleetingly if I pay to swim etc)
Very much appreciate that we all do things differently. Just surprised that personal care is included as a category and “drinks” isn’t,. Is data shared on the most popular categories by volume of transactions and value?
I have a similar problem with groceries. I’d quite like to separate out tracking of spending on food from spending on beers, but given that all spending is through the same supermarkets I can see how any solution would be non-trivial.
Similarly, I do know some people who would go to Spoons to eat out rather than drink
I’ve been trying to ‘hack’ my way around the limitations by using the expenses category, to an extent (I don’t use it otherwise really), but it does require a certain amount of discipline and keeping on top of transactions every day.
Thanks for reply. I can definitely see how it gets complicated and can also relate a lot to life stage.
Be very interested if Monzo did a data dump on what the category spends by value and transaction volume
phildawson
(Sorry, I will have to escalate this.)
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The supermarket hack atm is put through the beer or clothes etc at the front and put a divider down and say these are mine to pay separately. You pay for the first lot and then continue to the next batch.
It would be nice to have an add custom category button, and be able to rename the existing.
I also can’t wait to be able to split a transaction into multiple categories.
I’ve been using entertainment for drinking because honestly, not a lot else goes in there (pretty tragic, come to think about it). Interesting to see how other people break it down though.
