Slightly smarter budget cycles and marking accounts as a salary payer

Hi Monzo peeps!

I’ve been using the new Monzo app re-design and I’ve been loving it so far. It’s been a big motivator for some friends and family to move across to you guys, so a big thumbs up from me!

There are two suggestions I’d like to make though, which should work nicely together in fact, that I feel would improve my budgeting skills, and hopefully those of others!

The first one is a slightly smarter way of configuring the budgeting section of the app. Currently you can set it so the cycle restarts on the 1st of each month, or a custom day in the month (for example 29th), which is okay if there is a set date you’re paid. For me it’s a tricky one, as even though I have a predictable payday generally speaking, it always lies on the third to last working day of the calendar month. So for example:

  • This month will be the 29th as there’s no weekends in the way and October is 31 days long
  • In November, my pay is likely to be the 27th (30th lies on a Saturday, so it would be the third to last working day from the 29th, hence the 27th)
  • December is an exception as we always get paid before the holidays, though I wouldn’t expect Monzo to handle this
  • January 2020 would be the 29th
  • February would be the 26th
  • March would be the 27th

and so on. Hopefully you can see that it’s not necessarily always a fixed date! If there were options in the app to select ‘Last working day’, ‘Second to last working day’, ‘Third to last working day’ (for me!) and so on (maybe up to ‘Fifth’?), it would help my budgeting process become much smoother!

The second part is partially adding to the crowd of people who get paid via FPS rather than BACS, but the addition to mark a specific account (or accounts!) concerned with my income as the ‘Salary Payer’ (words are WIP - I trust you guys to come up with something better if needs be), I could take advantage of that throughout the app, but most importantly, I get the super sick notification stating it’s my payday. :grin:

I’m not expecting that ‘Salary Payer’ roll to magically allow us to use ‘Get Paid Early’ (I realise that’s a BACS-only thing), but it would be pretty cool… :thinking:

I hope other people agree with me on this one!

I’m confused, is it third to last working day or third to last day or?

This already exists, but not the other ones.

I think it’d be far simpler to just reset summary on “incoming credit from COMPANY above 3k or whatever your salary roughly is

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Ah yeah - sorry for the confusion - I meant the last working day of the month. I’ve edited my post above to clear that up!

From what I can see in the app at the moment, the solution is somewhat halfway there. You can set the day to best the 31st, say, and then tell it to pick the working day before it, but I’m not sure how that system copes with months shorter than 31 days (I can’t see much about this in the Help section of the app, though I could have missed it), and it still wouldn’t reset on the correct day for me specifically.

Your point about it resetting upon a salary payment is a really good idea, and I’d love that to be implemented too, though again you’d need the logic to tell it “hey, you’ve been paid today, and you have x amount of days before your next payday, worked out by looking at the nth working day before the end of the month”.

I get paid on the last working day and this works for me, it deals with months that are shorter than 31 days in the obvious way. That is, it works: it resets on the last working day of the month, no matter how long the month is.

Of course, that’s not any help to you!

This is a good point I’d not thought about, good catch.

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Restarting your budget As a result of getting paid doesn’t need to be too smart. Simply allowing a button in the budgeting section to reset it to day 1 would be fine.
I’ve gone full Monzo on the joint Acc but still get my pay into a dif Acc. The SO into the joint Acc happens the day after I know I’ll have been paid but I also make a manual tfr in to the joint Acc as there is an element of flexing that happens in my predicted spend. That manual tfr happens within hours of being paid and ideally I would like to restart my budget at that point.
For example, I might put some Christmas presents in my Amazon basket waiting until pay day so I can buy them. I would rather see them as “shopping” in the new month’s budget so I know how I’m tracking against my Christmas shopping budget for this coming month.