We think using Summary is a great way to control your budget. But it’s still got a way to go before it’s perfect. We’re starting to test a few changes to what’s in your ‘committed spending’ to give you clearer picture of how much you have to spend each month.
Until now, Summary has only been able to factor standing orders into your committed spending, Direct Debits and subscriptions haven’t been accounted for. This means the amount you have ‘left to spend’ hasn’t been totally accurate. We promised we’d work on fixing this, and from today, Direct Debits and some subscriptions will show in your committed spending, along with a prediction of next month’s payment.
This is the first step in testing how we predict your Direct Debits and subscriptions. We’d love your feedback on how this is working for you, make sure you let us know in this thread.
Great to hear about the improvements coming, not sure I understand the decision to exclude American Express from committed spending but leave other credit card providers in there? Ultimately they all offer the same service don’t they?
Looking forward to other subscriptions like Apple Music etc showing up in this feature though over time
Hey Jack. For now it’s just because we see a high volume of Amex Direct Debit usage, and want to avoid too many incorrect predictions. Once we have in-app controls over what is predicted and what isn’t, we’ll tone down the broad rules we’re applying, so people can decide for themselves what makes sense to predict each month.
It’s picking up my phone bill but not my PlayStation subscription. It’s currently warning me I’m £10 short which is awesome but it doesn’t take into account I have £100 “wages” coming tomorrow
Transactions that are under Committed Spending are automatically excluded from Targets and the dial calculation at the top (as both are intended to help with your day-to-day spending, rather than bills and large one-off purchases).
It probably doesn’t make sense for us to offer the Exclude toggle for committed transactions.
Does that make sense to you? What were you excluding the transaction for? What kinda DD transaction was it?
@Jami I have a Direct Debit for a CC I use for work or personal expenses which I’ll get paid back for, so last month I had a really large bill but it’s covered by money I’ll get back from work or from friends, so I don’t want it included in my targets or committed spending.
I marked the transaction as ‘Expenses’, I guess potentially it’d be better to be able to exclude that category entirely?
You’ll be able to set up prediction for your Playstation subscription soon!
When it comes to predicting wages, it’s something we’re hesitant to do, as we don’t want to risk getting it wrong and people spending money they don’t have because of it. Once the AI uprising happens, perhaps!
Ah okay. So I think what will make sense here, is for that Direct Debit to not be counted as a subscription, and not predicted each month. Then it won’t count as Committed Spending and you’ll be able to exclude it like normal.
If you DM me your email and the details of the transaction, we can fix it up for you whilst we work on adding controls to the app.
Automatically excluding Expenses is an interesting idea!
Are direct debits going to be taken into account from the next payment or is previous data going to be used? I’ve just checked my Summary and it’s not got any direct debits, except for those already paid.
We’ve looked at the last month’s of payments, and moved qualifying transactions over to Committed Spending. -Predictions are only rolled out to 10% of people right now, to make sure there aren’t huge problems. So that might be why you’re not seeing any future payments yet.
No magic rules for iTunes yet - we held off from assuming iTunes transactions are subscriptions because of individual purchases for downloads etc. We’ll leave it up to y’all to decide to turn on predictions for Apple stuff
