Splitting Cash Withdrawals into Several Categories

Hi. I think it would be a really good idea to be able to assign which category you’ve spent cash you’ve taken out on.

For example I’ve been putting in the notes of cash withdrawals what I’ve spent it on, but it would be great if I could assign it to one of the categories to help keep track even more.

Dave

6 Likes

You can change the category of an ATM withdrawal. Tap on Cash, and you would be able to choose any of the categories.

Hi,

Yes, I worked that out, but for instance, I’m in Greece and just took out €250. That’s not all going to go on one category (although most will likely be on ‘eating out’).

What I’d like to do is be able to break it down into what’s spent on different categories to really be able to keep track of spending.

Thanks

Dave

1 Like

I know the idea is to make all payments digital, but there are still times when I need a bit of cash on me (buying from market stalls etc). So I still take a little cash out from time to time.

One of the strong points of Monzo is the categorisation of expenditure, for budgeting purposes and to keep track of spending. With cash however, it just disappears without you knowing how you spent it.

It would be great if you could split money taken from ATM withdrawals, assigning portions of that cash to specific categories. So I take out £20 via ATM, that gets added to an unassigned pot, then I buy a burrito with cash at the local food market for £6. I can go to that pot and assign £6 of that unassigned money to an eating out category, perhaps even, searching for an establishment, adding a map etc.

Personally I think this would be useful, especially for those where budgeting and visibility of spending is very important.

5 Likes

So in that rare occasion I had to get cash out to pay for something I noticed I couldn’t assign this to what I spent that cash on without it always assigning cash to that category…

So, the idea would be: £10 Cash taken from ATM could be assigned to ‘food’ for £3.50, £6.50 assigned to something else, ie Travel. Would help me to keep track of what I’m spending money on in those old fashion times of needing the none-digital stuff!

1 Like

Thanks for sharing this Ollie, I’ve moved your post here to keep all of the discussion about this idea in one place, I hope that makes sense!

Here’s a roundup of what we know about managing this so far -

Click the :arrow_down_small: in the top right hand corner of this quote to view the full post.

Would be great to have the option to split up an ATM withdrawal so I can categorize spending accurately rather than having to use the notes.

3 Likes

Love the app so far, only been using it a couple of weeks. I really like the spending breakdown and receipt attachment functionality. What I think would be good though is if you could manually apply that to a single ATM line item. I often withdraw cash for use where I can’t use card, and would like to be able to tie a breakdown back to that line item, rather than it just a showing as £30 ATM - so it rolls up to my overall spending breakdown. Any plans for something like this?

Hi All,

New to Monzo, but I’ve been asked to put this suggestion in here.

I’ve been doing personal accounts for years, and have always been able to split a single transaction into separate categories.

e.g. I get £80 out of the ATM, this is shown as a single transaction, but in reality £50 of it is for Groceries and £30 is for Spending money.

Currently it’s not possible to do this so throws off your budget and tracking plan.

Could I propose the ability to split a single transaction into multiple transactions with different categories, the total of all the splits obviously cant go over the original single transaction amount.

Hope this helps, as a good suggestion.

Cheers

Nick

1 Like

Hi Nick.

Thanks for sharing this idea. This is a pain for me too, which one of the reasons why I almost never withdraw cash but obviously sometimes you have to :grimacing:

To put the current design in context, take a look at this roundup which I’ve compiled here -

https://community.monzo.com/t/splitting-cash-withdrawals-into-several-categories-3/6136/2?u=alexs

we do know that we’ll be able to split ‘expenses’ into multiple Categories -

https://community.monzo.com/t/breakdown/9589

& my guess is that this will also be an option for 'holidays, while ‘cash’ is the other category that seems to fall into that group for me so maybe we’ll have this fairly soon :crossed_fingers:

I like this idea. However, I think its usefulness isn’t limited to cash withdrawals, and it would be helpful to be able to categorise all transactions in this way. For example:

  1. Payment in John Lewis, part of which is food and the other part clothing/household items/etc
  2. Payment to a person to cover my share of rent, bills and food
  3. Payment of a credit card bill, which covers everything including food, transport, holidays, etc (though I hope that in time Monzo will leverage open banking to allow its customers to view all their credit card transactions within the Monzo app, and categorise them individually to give them a very granular and accurate view of their spending)
2 Likes

In theory it would but this is where Hugo’s comment from my ‘round up’ post applies -

Perhaps if Flux takes off, the categorisation of these sorts of transactions can be automated.

This seems like it could be solved by bill splitting, assuming that the other person is a Monzo user too..

And I agree with your comments about needing Open Banking for this!

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That’s not quite what I meant. In all three cases, I meant I’d like to categorise a single payment into three separate categories. So if I make a single payment at John Lewis for items that would each go into separate categories, I can do that without having to artificially make three separate payments at the till.

Ditto a single payment to someone for my rent AND food AND bills. So I might pay £1000, of which £750 for rent, £150 for bills and £100 for food, but to make each of those categorise properly right now, I’d have to make three separate payments to them. The idea here is to split a payment I’ve already made into separate categories

Emphasis mine.

I thought so - my replies were addressing that request.

Bill splitting is slightly different because if you were using it, you would be splitting each transaction that your flat mate’s made, rather than a single lump sum. Since those transactions probably won’t be made all at the same time, I’d prefer to take that approach, plus it’s functionally that’s already been built.

Just wanted to make a topic for this to see if there is widespread support from the community.

To tie in with the new Summary/Targets it would be great to be able to Split an ATM Withdrawal and categorise it into separate categories I.e: £20 Withdrawal - £10 categorized as Entertainment, £5 as Travel and £5 as Family and so on and so forth. What do we think?

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Or even better they could just reinstate the Cash category they cynically removed! :thought_balloon:

2 Likes

I liked the cash category, but would prefer a way to split transactions and assign them to ‘proper’ categories. However, whether you like the Cash category or not I don’t see what’s ‘cynical’ about its removal?

2 Likes

It looks like there is - I’ve moved your post to this topic where other users have requested this functionality too, to keep all of the discussion in one place, I hope that’s ok!

3 Likes

I got cash out for the first day today!

I’m using £3 from it and my mate has transferred me £7 to make up the rest.

Would be great if I could use his transfer to cancel out a bit of the cash withdrawal, as well as split cash withdrawals into different categories!

It’s not pretty, but the way I am currently getting around this is by making a bank transfer from me to myself, you can categorise both sides of the transaction, allowing you to debit one category and credit another.

Not sure if self-to-self transfers are intended or not though :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like