I currently have both my fuel and food coming from the same merchant. It doesn’t help much when budgeting, I’d like to see Tesco and Tesco Fuel separated, the same of course with other supermarkets!
Also, I’d like to further separate ‘transport’ and ‘fuel’ into two categories. My car costs a set amount a month… Having to deduct this amount from ‘transport’ just to find out how much I’m spent on fuel this month is an unnecessary step I think.
I agree on the sub categories especially in transport. I spend around £300 a month on fuel and probably the same again on flights, two of the biggest expenses from my account but I would like to split them.
This should be easy to do as most supermarkets have a different description for the transaction depending on if it is supermarket or fuel.
Also agree - Same happens with Eating Out and Drinking. Last night I was in a bar where i bought a beer, but it is tagged as Eating Out. I wouldn’t class that as Entertainment, as that is for things like bowling, cinema, concert tickets etc.
Yep in total agreement of this!
Prior to the latest app update I had all Tesco transactions listed as “Groceries” (including the petrol ones), now, after the update, all my Tesco transactions are listed as “Transport” (even the grocery ones!)
Hello!
I wanted to add some comments to this thread to try and answer some of your questions and hopefully clarify a few things. We are learning a lot about merchant data as we go, so your patience is really appreciated. 
Grocery store vs petrol station
When we receive information about merchants there is a flag which tells us what kind of merchant this is. For example, it might say ‘Restaurant’, ‘Service station’, or ‘Grocery store’. This helps us categorise your transactions.
However, with regards to Tesco’s and Sainsbury’s, some people may go into the service station to buy their milk on a regular basis. Some service stations have quite a large food selection, so people may use the shop regularly for things other than petrol. We have no way of distinguishing between the two. We therefore made the decision to categorising all of the Tesco’s merchants as one.
We had a slight issue earlier this week where the stores were miss-categorised as transport, but this has now been fixed.
Categorising things
If you find that your petrol purchases are being categorised as groceries, you can very easily change the category to transport. In addition, if you want to add expenditure to sub-categories, for example splitting out fuel and airline travel, you can add notes. Notes are searchable.
Hopefully that helps to clear things up! 
Natasha
I think a lot of us sympathise with the fact that you have to work with what you’re given (revolutionising an industry can’t be easy!) but it’s good to get some confirmation/insight into it.
I didn’t know that notes were searchable so that’s really useful to know!
Thanks for the update 
Love the work going on here.
Not sure I agree with the reasoning on the decision to make Tesco and sainsburys service stations display by default as groceries though. I’d have though the majority of people in a fuel station are there for fuel, not groceries. Surely the default action should match the more popular use for the merchant?
@Matty I’d agree with you. I think categorising as the retail outlets main function would work best. Petrol station comes under transport, if required it could be manually changed to groceries. I feel most people use the tesco petrol station for that purpose rather than shopping. Just my opinion. What’s everyone else’s thoughts??
Definitely, I mean even if you did buy groceries, if you spend £40-£50 filling up your car, or even £20 just topping it up, chances are that makes up most of the cost… Who’s doing full shops in petrol stations? Plus, even if you do buy, you’re most likely buying car related items that comes under transport anyway. The only exception is chocolate, milk and possible a last minute item or two
when you fill up at sainsburys have you not already done your food shopping and paid at the checkout and classed it as groceries , then taken your car to the filling station and pay for your fuel at the fuel checkout - two different transactions at Sainsburys - this surely then gives you the option of changing the category to transport or noting fuel on the amount if you want to separate fuel from servicing costs in transport ? both spends have been at Sainsburys which presumably as a seller has one id code (?) so can’t be separated (?)
Just like to add, I went to a shell garage today and actually did for once spend a little money on some food items as the Shell garage is connect to a Spar. This all came through under ‘Shell’ not Spar and was put into Transport. I don’t have a problem with this, as again I spent much more on fuel, but then this same logic should be applied back to Tesco fuel stations
Hi again!
We have discussed this a lot internally and agree with your reasons for wanting the groups split out. It is something we are going to do, but it won’t be immediately because of the restraints on engineering time. 
:mondo:
Thanks,
Natasha
We need to be able to split a transaction into multiple categories if we need. When I buy from a superstores I buy drugs, food, equipment, clothes and lottery tickets! I buy lunch from Boots some days and drugs the next. All the categories are meaningless unless you can manually split transactions.
A post was merged into an existing topic: Custom Categories - 1
I agree with @Matteo with the category being the main function of the shop. If you really wanted to split your shopping while getting petrol then you could do just that, pay separately. Then categorise them as appropriate.
For budgeting this can be a pain when grouping purchases into a single payment. Like when doing the weekly shop but adding a DVD or some clothes for example. So when I remember (not often) I put it through as separate payments. Then can categorise as needed.
The only option until rich transaction data starts being sent with payments.
I’m hoping this will happen someday. But I’m not too optimistic that it will happen anytime soon as even paypal (who don’t seem to have any technological limitations in this respect) don’t have rich data for anything I have bought recently. They must aspire to want to provide this data but they are perfectly happy to accept unitemised requests for payment.
could this data be made available to the app, and have an advanced option to tweak these things. As a for instance I always topup my electric at a filling station I never use for my car, so I might want to flag all transactions for that retailer under electric
I use retailers that also sell petrol: i.e. Tesco, Morrison’s and Sainburys.
Monzo can’t recognise when I’ve used them for groceries or fuel (transport) even though they show as petrol/shopping on my normal bank statement.
Hi Chris, this has been raised before so I’ve moved your post here. Hopefully you’ll find Natasha’s comments earlier in the topic helpful