I’ve noticed that for at least the last two weeks the summary balance on my account is completely wrong. For instance, right now I have £9.52 in my main pot, £74.81 in a ‘round up’ pot and £48 in another pot that I have been transferring to with IFTTT when I cycle to work.
However, my summary says I have £74.53 available, which is obviously wrong.
What is going on? iOS 12/ v2.16.0 of the app.
Pots don’t count towards your summary balance.
The summary balance is the balance shown on the main transactions view minus Commited Spending. Have you anything under Committed Spending in Summary?
Or I may have just completely misunderstood you?
Nope, I have no committed spending or DD’s going out of Monzo. The summary should be showing £9.58, the balance in my main pot. Not £70+.
Do you have an overall budget set?
I do, yes.
The summary balance and your account balance are not linked.
Your summary is based on any spend according to the budget you have set for the month.
Your balance that is detailed on your home screen is calculated by what’s actually in your account.
So my budget is around £200 and it’s showing me I have £160 left. But actually I have a lot more in my account because bills.
This could work the other way where your balance at the start of your summary is lower than the budget you have set, so it would show lower.
Does that help you understand this difference any more? Let me know if it doesn’t!
I think the summary tab is really confusing. My current assumption is:
If you have not set a spending budget:
Left to spend = [Main account balance] - [Committed spending that is so far unspent in current pay cycle]
If you are using spending budget:
Left to spend = [Spending Budget] - [Money spent so far in current pay cycle that’s not considered committed spending]
Is this correct @BethS ?
Sounds spot on understanding 
Hi Beth, I’m afraid that still doesn’t make sense to me.
As an example, say I have a monthly budget set of £650, and every month on the 1st I transfer £650 into my Monzo account. Sometimes there is a bit left over from the previous month, in this case there was £10 in the account, so at the start of the month I had a budget of £650 and a total of £660 in my main account. There are no other ingoing funds.
I then proceed to make £650 worth of transactions (no committed spends, no direct debits, just card transactions, transfers and automated IFTTT pot transfers).
This leaves me with £10 in my main pot. The summary should surely also say £10. But it says £70. The problem is that the summary is telling me I have significantly more available in my main pot than I actually do. Again, there are no committed spends to take into account.
Is the problem transactions that aren’t linked to budget items (such as transfers/cash withdrawals/pot transfers)? If so, that surely seems counterintuitive when one would expect the summary to take into account what is actually your balance when showing you the remaining funds.
If you have a monthly budget of £650 set, I believe your Left to Spend should say £0 after the spending pattern you describe. I believe it should only say £10 if you don’t have a monthly budget set.
Not sure where the £70 left to spend comes from (still trying to get my head round this tab myself), but I wonder if you have £70 worth of Excluded transactions (bottom of summary screen)?
It does do this when you don’t set an overall budget. There are two different modes of operation for the Summary tab depending on whether or not you have set a budget. See my previous post, but I also managed to find another post which makes it clearer:
Hmm, that helps a lot, thank you. It does seem very counterintuitive… I don’t seem to have an ‘excluded spending’ category though.
Maybe I’ll have to scrap the budget to get a more logical summary, because the budget is what I transfer in anyway!
I believe the thinking is there are broadly two groups of users, with each group having a distinct approach or distinct needs to money management/budgeting and they are trying to satisfy both.
One approach (your approach) is for your total budget to be implicitly defined by the amount of money in your account at the start of the month. To make summary work for you, you need to avoid explicitly specifying an overall budget. But I think (although not entirely sure) that you can still use category budgets and left to spend will still be calculated based on your balance, as you wish. You just need to avoid explicitly setting overall budget.
The other approach (explicitly set an overall budget) is more suitable for people who use Monzo as their main bank account and so may have a lot more money in their account than they want to spend in a single month. For them, it’s better for left to spend to be calculated from an specified overall budget rather than from their account balance.
EDIT - Second approach also useful for people whose income is irregular or comes in multiple times a month (and so total budget can’t be implicitly defined by account balance at start of month).
I think what Monzo are trying to do is commendable (satisfy two camps) but they are not communicating well enough how the summary tab works and how its behaviour changes depending on whether or not you explicitly set an overall budget. The distinction really needs to be signposted effectively within the app. I’ve had to dig around the community and play around with the options in the app to understand what’s going on. That shouldn’t be necessary.
To see the excluded spending section just temporarily mark one your transactions as excluded and then switch back to the summary tab.
I have a similar problem, with exclude from summary not actually excluding the amount.
For example i spent 210£.
Scrolling down i can see it is made of 100£ spending 100£ committed spending and £10 excluded.
However when i look at the monthly total on top it says 210£ rather than £200… 
The app covers this in the help section:
“How does Summary work out how much money I have leftover”
It basically says that in order to stay within your budget based on your current spending habits you can only spend X amount. So mine says I can spend £86 but I have £107 in as I’ve gone over some of my budgets but under on others. If you search the help section of the app for the word summary it’ll explain it there 