Summary page needs big improvements

Hi all

Unless I’m doing something wrong or missing something, then the ‘Summary’ page needs work.

It’s really not very intuitive and it’s very difficult to see the budget’s you have set and compare them with what you have spent…

I just opened my Summary page, it says I have spent £205 eating out this month. I then realised I had set a budget for this for £80, but I kinda forgot I even set this budget as it’s not immediately available on this screen.

1.The ‘Did you know?’ section is really clunky. It looks like something that should only be there once or twice as an introduction. 'Do you know you can set the overall budget? Well, you don’t even really set an overall budget, you set individual budgets, including extra spending which totals to an overall budget, so it’s a bit confusing.

  1. To access your budgets you have to click 'show me on the ‘did you know’ or the target at the top to see your budgets. There should be a simple ‘manage spending’ or ‘manage budget’ option.

  2. You should be able to see your budget and actual spending together and see if you are on track.

I’ve posted a picture below of the current Summary screen and what I think the screen should look like which makes a lot more sense in my opinion.

a
c

1 Like

Hey! :slight_smile: I think you are, let me try and get some screenshots without oversharing :slight_smile:

If you swipe this then it will disappear.

You can, this is what I do. I prefer a monthly total to individual budgets.

If you click on the icon that looks like a target in the top right you can access your budget settings, this the main place to get to them once you have side swiped the ‘Did you know’ section away. The calendar icon next to it lets you see historical figures.

You can :slight_smile: You have to confirm it by pressing the ‘tick’ when setting it up for it to confirm it as a budget, not just as a suggestion.

3 Likes

@dannybaws

Some illustrations to go with my other post:

You can get to budgets from here:
Screenshot_20181223_003346

If you have previous spending then it will show up in LIGHT GRAY. This is NOT a budget, just a suggestion of what you might want your budget to be based on past months:
Screenshot_20181223_003427

If you use the +/- you can set a budget for a category. You MUST press the ‘tick’ in the top right to save the change (whether adding, modifying, or deleting). Note that it changes to BLACK text:
Screenshot_20181223_003512

If you tap on the budget once set you can remove it using the ‘disable’ option that pops up:
Screenshot_20181223_003545

When you are back in the main summary screen it then shows up with your progress, as so:
Screenshot_20181223_003630

What I prefer for me is an overall budget, you can set this up in addition or instead of, like so:
Screenshot_20181223_003653

Then in the main screen it shows up like this (the text cutting off is a known bug):
Screenshot_20181223_003805

If you click on the ‘calendar’ icon in the top right of summary you can go back to previous months.

If you have manually tagged a transaction as committed spending, or its auto assigned any direct debit you have set up this will NOT be counted as coming off your budget. The budget is (currently) design to be for your discretionary spending AFTER all repeating payments have been made.

If you mark a payment as ‘excluded’ in its individual view then it will NOT show up in summary. I use this if I am transferring money out to my non-monzo account for example.

P.S. When doing your initial post nice work making a mockup to illustrate what you meant :slight_smile:

5 Likes

Thanks folk. Yeah. Not sure how I was supposed to know I could swipe that thing away, hahah. Maybe this should be clearer because that thing was annoying.

Yeah. My budgets were in there, for like 5 different things, set. But for some reason they were not showing a progress bar at all, or spent amount. I went back into my budgets and clicked one of them and then clicked the tick and now they are all on the main screen with correct amounts remaining etc, not sure if this was a bug or whatever, but it’s working now so good :smiley:

I’m still a little confused by the budget thing. Excluding committed spending. So that’s not an overall budget then? You said you can choose ‘instead of’, how does one do this?

thanks

:heart:

:100: Same here, I only knew it because I saw someone on here say it!
(cc @cookywook to pass on to whichever PM owns summary?).

[quote=“dannybaws, post:5, topic:56158”]
I went back into my budgets and clicked one of them and then clicked the tick and now they are all on the main screen with correct amounts remaining etc,

Something about clicking the tick must have made the difference I guess!

So by ‘instead of’ I mean I have no budgets set to individual categories. They have the grey text for suggestions, but none have the black text for active. I ONLY have the overall summary set. I keep an eye on what the totals are for the breakdown, but I don’t have a strict limit on each one.

‘committed spending’ would be say your phone bill, coming out by direct debit. This, for many people, would be the same amount per month. So say for me, my phone is £10 per month. I set my budget to £400. So OVERALL I know my limit is £410, my budget + my committed spending. The budget in summary is set based on the things that can change each month, but your life budget is summary budget + committed spending.

Not sure if that makes sense? It’s intuitive to me, but has been raised before that not everyone finds it so - and it is clearly hard to put into words!

1 Like

I suppose they were going by the logic of people being used to swiping to remove notifications and the like. However, I guess people aren’t so used to doing that to remove stuff within an app (yet?) and therefore it may come across as a little unintuitive to some.

Personally, I kinda just swiped at the thing I wanted gone and it went away :joy:

This happened to me on iOS once when a new summary period started. It kind of soft disabled the budgets and ended up having to do the same thing you did to fix it. Hasn’t happened again thankfully though, so might just be a first month bug thing (been working fine for months now).

1 Like

Great support, @rolanddeschain. :grinning:

2 Likes

Blockquote‘
committed spending’ would be say your phone bill, coming out by direct debit. This, for many people, would be the same amount per month. So say for me, my phone is £10 per month. I set my budget to £400. So OVERALL I know my limit is £410, my budget + my committed spending. The budget in summary is set based on the things that can change each month, but your life budget is summary budget + committed spending.

Thanks, this is what I thought the thing did. Which does make sense. The thing confusing me was the ‘did you know you can set the overall budget’. You DO NOT set the overall budget. You SET, as you say, the budget excluding committed spending and from this the overall budget is CALCULATED (not set). I know that’s me being a bit literal, but I often read things literally and I can’t do anything about that, unless it’s crystal clear it can be confusing and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

It’s the world OVERALL that needs omitted.
‘Did you know you can set spending budgets’ would make much more sense.
Or ‘Did you know you can set spending budgets and category budgets’
Or just ‘Did you know you can set budgets’.

Then when the user goes onto this screen it should make sense. However,

The other thing that is more than a little confusing is the word ‘committed spending’.

‘Excluding your committed spending, what’s the most you want to spend?’. For some reason I thought committed spending was a combination of scheduled payments and the category budgets below. But as far as I am aware now (from above help) it is only in relation to scheduled payments.

Committed spending is a very weird term and especially because the ‘category budgets’ all appear on the previous page as ‘spending’, I’m thinking are they included or not because I’ve ‘committed’ them as allowable spending.

It should read "Excluding your scheduled payments, what’s the most you want to spend’? Scheduled payments is what it’s called on the app so why give it a different more confusing name?

This simple word change for the budgets screen and the ‘did you know’ hint would have made me understand straight away.

thanks

1 Like