I guess there are quite a lot of reasons a user might be wanting to view their spending so its hard to design for them all.
For me personally I think there are exciting things that bank that ‘knows me’ could do.
For example what about identifying trends in my discretionary spending to help me manage it? Am I spending more or less on lunch / coffee each day than I normally do? Could I be considering going to a different merchant nearby to save money (or maybe there are more popular/highly rated ones)? I think some things here can be done without line item information e.g. if I spend each day between 11.30-2 its probably my lunch
I find the current category list a bit difficult to use for the purposes of tracking my discretionary spend as giving ‘eating out’ there are several types that mean very different things to me from a money management point of view:
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- What I spend on lunch each day
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- What I spend when going out for meals with friends/family etc (would spend a lot more but am interested if I’m spending more or less on this over a month etc!)
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- What I spend when eating out on holiday (I see this more as a ‘holiday’ cost and would be more interested in the cost of the holiday overall)