Not doubting the demand at all.
As a software engineer, I completely agree with you that people underestimate what goes into ‘just add this simple thing’, and of course I underestimate how long it’ll take me to do, too!
In this case though, given it was ‘coming in the next few months’ three years ago, and it’s been radio silence since, I’m pretty well convinced there’s been a product decision not to support category splitting. Perhaps because Monzo wants the marketplace to take off to such an extent that ‘categories’ isn’t a core feature, so enhancing it further is short-sighted. Just guessing.
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Yep, that will be good even if there is only possibility to split in two categories and have quick slider to adjust value without need of typing specifically.
Up voted!
Sometimes a single transaction may cover more than one section in my budget and it’d be really helpful if I could allocate a portion of the spend to different sections eg split between groceries and personal care.
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Hello 
I’ve moved your post into here as the suggestion is really similar, I hope you don’t mind. If you cast your vote at the top it will help Monzo prioritise what features the community want next.
The whole categories thing is completely broken. It should be blindingly obvious that categories need to be exclusive. Whoever came up with the current options clearly has never had to deal with data management before.
What are your suggested categories? I’m found them to cover most situations
Criticism is cheap, solutions are hard. Can you describe what you’re actually looking for since I don’t understand your issue from what you’ve presented so far.
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I would have thought it would be blindingly obvious
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Er, really?
Exactly what I said: it’s utterly pointless having non-exclusive categories as anyone with a modicum of experience about this sort of task would know.
What do we currently have?
Bills
Charity
Eating Out
Entertainment
Expenses
Family
Finances
General
Groceries
Holidays
Personal Care
Shopping
Transport
It’s completely pointless because each time I categorise the same thing as something different because it’s so far from clear.
I pay friends mainly for things like drinks, meals, gigs, accommodation, etc., etc. but I never know what’s the “right” place for something and similar transactions end up spread about which completely undermines the purpose.
Let me go through my last payments.
Double glazing. Is this General, Expenses, Family, or Bills?
Dinner with clients. Expenses? Eating Out? Entertainment?
Sunday lunch quiz at social centre in aid of refugees. Eating out? Charity? Family? Entertainment?
Train, gig ticket and hotel room. Bills? Expenses? Holiday? Transport? Entertainment?
Bottomless brunch. Entertainment? Eating out?
Phone credit. Expenses? Bills?
Spanish Hipermercado getting new socks, filling the cheese drawer, stuff for sushi party, bisque and rillettes. Groceries? Shopping? Entertainment? Holidays?
Petrol, bowling and food with sister’s family. Entertainment? Eating out? Family? WTF is the point of this?!
Deposit to bet365. General? Finances? Expenses? Bills?
The very first thing should be making exclusive categories where it’s obvious where each item goes and it can only go in one place. Ask any librarian for a start. Anyone dealing with a filesystem with 1*10^12-18 inodes. You think about this stuff at a very basic level and make it better than this. The current system as something someone though was suitable really beggars belief.
It’s simply not fit for purpose.
There is no right way to categorise things, you put them where you want. You really want a list of what goes into each category?
I use expenses category for childcare as it’s an expense for working, others use it for expenses they can claim back.
Custom categories are coming which might help
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Custom categories are the only way you’ll keep everyone happy.
I think the current categories were a good starting point and need to evolve. Which is kinda how Monzo work.
To repeat the question @jph - what is the list of categories you think Monzo should have? You’ve given your thinking but not an answer? Curious to see what you say as I have no idea what an inode is, so be good to get a more educated view maybe?
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I have no idea what a Hipermercado is
Just a big supermarket I guess (french say hypermarche!)
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I don’t understand your issues, forgive me… You put your payments where you want, it’s not up to Monzo or us to dictate who does what. If you feel a meal for refugees is classed as charity, put it there. If you go out for drinks with clients and you’re claiming it back off work, put it in expenses…
Where the current categories fall flat is when you buy more than one type of thing in one transaction, the classic example being food as well as clothes in a supermarket - I’d want this to be split between food and shopping.
The only workaround at the moment is to physically split your shopping in two at the till and pay twice or pay on a credit card and send two separate lots of money to pay it off.
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You’ve still not described what categories you’re looking for. Instead you’ve just gone on an even bigger rant which isn’t helping anyone 
I could easily categorise all your examples but if I had to guess at what categories you’d want most of them would be useless to me because the current ones cover everything just fine.
It sounds like custom categories might help if you’d like more granular control. Vote for it here:
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Did any of you read my reasoning?! I’ve made my issue and my suggestion very clear. The issue is that it’s impossible to use them with any consistency thus rendering them utterly unfit for purpose.
The reason I mentioned inodes is because categories (as opposed to tags) are analogous to a folder-based file system. Each file (transaction) can go in one folder (category) and only one. This is so they aren’t all disorganised in the root folder and so you can find them easily and perhaps run analyses like du.
With the current category system all of those benefits are lost and it’s even worse than having no categories at all. If I want to find all my gig ticket purchases, say, or all my family meals I have to look through several folders manually to find them and keep statistics manually.
When designing something like this it’s literally common sense and probably the first and most important item on the design criteria to make them exclusive categories. Seriously, how is that not obvious!
My suggestions are just that. I don’t really care what they are as long as they are changed so that a) they are exclusive and b) there is a category for every possible transaction (even using a catch-all is fine).
So a trivial suggestion would be to pare them down by removing some of the ambiguous ones. You could do this by looking at user data (which I don’t have) if you want.
(If you’ve never stepped foot in one of the 20+ countries home to half a billion native Spanish speakers, your knowledge of English etymology or analogy to familiar romance words would render Hiper Mercardo fairly self explanatory even if a cursory google search doesn’t)
If that’s possible it would probably solve my issue so I’d love to see your insight.
Thank you for taking the time to explain 
I’m not sure if it is intentional but part of the reason you’re getting the responses that you are is that your posts are coming across as quite aggressive. You’re attacking people instead of offering constructive criticism and being open for discussion.
Hopefully what myself and others have posted will help guide you to resolving this. Let us know if you need anything further.
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