'Services' category

Feedback & Ideas
1

For transactions such as car washing, hair dressers, paid repairs, carers etc

2

I would put car washing with car fuel and car servicing not with hairdressing

3

I would put hairdressing under “Personal Care” or “Health & Beauty”, along with purchases from Boots, Superdrug, a pharmacy, etc.

3 Likes
4

Aaaaaaaaaand there we show the crux of the categories issue in three posts.

EDIT: Paging @alexs, I think you should save this thread in your bibliography of Monzo to paste in every time categories comes up.

5 Likes
5

Exactly :laughing:

There’s a practically infinite number of ways to categorise a transaction and it’s down to personal preference. There’s no way to satisfy everyone.

I think the best we can realistically hope for in the short to medium term is the ability to rename existing categories to our liking. Currently transactions are categorised by category name. Perhaps they should be categorised by category ID and have a local setting in the app to map those IDs to custom category names of our choosing.

Taken from the monzo API documentation.

{
"transaction": {
    "account_balance": 13013,
    "amount": -510,
    "created": "2015-08-22T12:20:18Z",
    "currency": "GBP",
    "description": "THE DE BEAUVOIR DELI C LONDON        GBR",
    "id": "tx_00008zIcpb1TB4yeIFXMzx",
    "merchant": {
        "address": {
            "address": "98 Southgate Road",
            "city": "London",
            "country": "GB",
            "latitude": 51.54151,
            "longitude": -0.08482400000002599,
            "postcode": "N1 3JD",
            "region": "Greater London"
        },
        "created": "2015-08-22T12:20:18Z",
        "group_id": "grp_00008zIcpbBOaAr7TTP3sv",
        "id": "merch_00008zIcpbAKe8shBxXUtl",
        "logo": "https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/527043602623389696/68_SgUWJ.jpeg",
        "emoji": "🍞",
        "name": "The De Beauvoir Deli Co.",
        "category": "eating_out"
    },
    "metadata": {},
    "notes": "Salmon sandwich 🍞",
    "is_load": false,
    "settled": "2015-08-23T12:20:18Z"
}
}

The downside of such a change would mean that Monzo aren’t able to accurately analyse our use of categories, which should be added or removed from the default set. I’m sure there are other pros and cons, but I can’t think of them.

1 Like
6

Haha good thinking!

Actually it’s good to see this post because Monzo’s categories are due to be reviewed in ~a month :wink:

all we need is a name, it doesn’t really matter how Monzo’s user’s interpret it, as long as it fills a gap (& it’s not too broad for Monzo to have a rough idea of how it will be used) :slight_smile:

7

Nice idea but I’m not sure that would work, if someone changes Entertainment to Travel (for example) then Monzo’s aggregation efforts would still be broken :cry:

8

Have just joined and would agree with many of these comments - I personally would love to see a personal care/health category. And definitely some sort of category for essential things we have to do but rarely e.g. Car M.O.T etc.

Thanks!

9

A post was merged into an existing topic: Custom Categories - 1