My name is Lee and I’m a Designer on the on Business Banking team.
This is my first post here and I’d love to take the opportunity to share some early exploration on something the team is currently thinking about. Budgeting categories .
There is a lot we want to cover in the future such as setting rules, creating custom categories, powering up budgeting / forecasting tools, as well as making your bookkeeping and reconciliation simpler.
We’ve spoken to a number of you already and as a first step we’d like to introduce key categories that are relevant to a business. This includes creating income categories as well as the existing group of categories.
We’re hoping this first iteration will make bookkeeping and reconciliation simpler whilst also powering a more contextual summary view of your business account.
Categories for business accounts would be useful as an insight for a director into the company spending and I think you have nailed the main categories. Although ultimately I think most small limited company owners use some form of accounting software to create reports, so if the categories can be linked/exported to those with the transactions into Xero for example that would be a lot more useful.
If Monzo could create a simple and nice looking management report page every quarter breaking down income (in order of customers), spending (categories) and tax (VAT and Corporation tax estimate) that would be super helpful as well. Basically a more advanced/detailed version of the current Summary page.
Just bringing this thread back to life! We’ve had lots of feedback that you all would love some new categories. We’re working on it! what are some of your top category requests and why?
I’d second the advice to look at coconut, and also perhaps xero. Note the way coconut also use this as a way to advise and educate freelancers/small business owners on what are allowable expenses for example, and then use it to give a simple tax estimate.
My dream as a small ltd owner is to click a button and monzo files my taxes with hmrc (assuming all income/expenses came through that account) - wouldn’t suit larger businesses but would suit many freelancers.
The current categories are not relevant for businesses, so better just removed for this type of account. Income categories I’d keep simple (again see coconut), what you have above looks ok. Expense categories are pretty well defined already for the UK at least, so there’s no need to attempt to come up with a simplification, better IMO to have all the commonly accepted ones.
Lack of categories for important things like savings is one of my few annoyances with using a monzo personal account the last few years, and for business accounts it would just be annoying to be so limited - you need more than 15 IMO.
Is “rip off the competition” really the only answer anyone has to this question? I’m surprised in one respect and I don’t think it’s the right approach to take. You may end up with much the same answer as a competitor but it’s surely better to come at it for your own reasons than simply copy other people’s homework.
If that’s what people want then yes, that’s 2 people’s opinions on what they want at the end of the day, does it really matter that they mentioned a different service and said to look at them, nope not in the slightest.
Most financial platforms are all pretty much coming ofb age where there’s going to be nothing new to discuss other than such and such does this can you do that too
I am not business owner, nor an accountant. I am a software developer who used to write accounting and ERP systems.
This view for income/expenses is ok. But it doesn’t account for refunds of either sales or purchases.
For example, if my customer returns a purchase and I send money back to them I should be able to have it under sales category, and have negative impact on my taxes pot. I.e. 120 refund, can be funded by 100 from the account and 20 from the tax pot (VAT).
Similarly if my expenses/deposits/purchases are refunded they are not income either. But should reduce my bills category too.
It always feels odd when “expenses” are making money, or “income” is loosing money, but such is life.
I don’t know how to design for this. But there should be a way to have income/expense with inverse tax impact. Aka “sales refunds” as expense category, and “expenses refunds” as income categories. Or something to that effect. Otherwise refunds of either kind will have incorrect impact on sales & expenses.
I think having categories such as Accountancy Fees, Equipment, Subsistence, Fuel, Insurance, Marketing, Materials, Parking, Phone, Postage, Software, Stationery, Stock, Subscrriptions, Training, Research, Travel, Pension etc would be really useful. Having an ‘info’ button telling you what the category is for and example suggestions of what to put in it is REALLY useful.
Also, it would be good to have the option to hide/show categories that each user uses or doesn’t, to make their list easier to navigate and the categories they use easier to find, e.g. I don’t think I will use a ‘work clothing’ category in my business but I can imagine many other users would, so it would be great if I could hide that category. If I needed it in the future I could always switch it on again.
and I’d love to take the opportunity to share some early exploration on something the team is currently thinking about. Budgeting categories .
