Regular readers will know that I’m on a bit of a crusade for Monzo to spark joy in its users.
That means little things that @avb and team have done so well on new Trends features, like colour coded graphs that change depending on what account youve got selected.
But it’s also about the big picture and making the various different functions in Monzo come together so they are more than the sum of their parts and so they work effortlessly and joyfully with each other.
Here’s what I said in another topic:
So, rather than just grumbling, I thought it’d be useful to have a place where we can expose some of the stuff that doesn’t work as well as it might, and suggest ways that it might join up better. And, well, spark joy.
So I’ve put these in varying places but let me put them all here:
Pay cycles don’t work with Get Paid Early. I get paid on the last working day of the month. I use Get Paid Early so I get my salary the working day before. That causes a whole world of pain. Two excellent Monzo features but they don’t work together. Sadness.
Monzo Plus / Premium payments can’t be made from Bills Pots. I mean this is a bit of a silly one. Bills pots: excellent - love them. But irony of all ironies - it works with every payment except Monzo’s own.
Virtual card payments from pots break Google Export. Okay, the Google Sheets export is gonna be a niche sport. But for those of us who partake it’s pretty important. And is still a selling point of Plus. Arguably virtual card payment from Pots has more utility, but breaking an existing feature to create a new one ain’t cool.
All the different Pot problems (there are many) could do with an upgrade. My current niggle - let me upgrade my existing pot with higher interest rate without having to archive it and create a new one.
The feedback area highlights a lot but off the top of my head things like Pot to Pot transfers, pot conversions (without archiving) and losing transaction history. Imagine if there was a message when you’re on the pot card and it says “Shawbrook rates are higher than Oaknorth, would you like to switch?” On pressing yes some magical wizardry converts the pot to the new provider.
When you send money, you can choose a category for the transfer. Great!
But that screen hasn’t been updated to let you choose multiple categories, so if I want to do that then I need to pick a category, then tap back into the transaction and go through the categorisation process again.
Sparks minor irritation (and, on occasion, anger) rather than joy.
Plus/Premium users when initiating open banking transfer money, one doesn’t see the connected account balance which was just there on the previous screen. Requires mental fortitude to remember how much was available, if one wants to transfer all but a specific amount to Monzo.
On sparking joy, I really appreciate merchant logos, ability to search entire account, and ability to add notes to transactions. These are features you generally still don’t get (at least not to the same degree) at traditional banks.
On joining up features that don’t play well with each other - editing the notes field on bank transfer transactions currently also leads to modification of the bank transfer reference field. This really, really shouldn’t happen. It’s inappropriate (reference field should be read only after a transaction has taken place), and does the opposite of sparking joy!
One I’ve noticed for a while but just got reminded of today.
Would love to be able to save a multi-category split on a recurring transaction.
Monzo has the smarts to recognise and track a recurring transaction and to remember one category for it - if it could just remember more than one and the according split, that would be lovely
