I disagree that Trends and budgeting are distinct. What’s the point of seeing where you spent money unless it’s to inform your future spending? (and, usually, to know what fat to trim).
That’s just a higher-level part of the budgeting process. If you define “budget” narrowly as “those little per-slider categories on that one page in the app”, then it’s clearly distinct. But I think that Trends is clearly not distinct from “budgeting”, as it’s used generally, as in the concept of budgeting.
Different people, different views!
This is kinda my point. Summary isn’t going anywhere until the functionality is all moved over. The budgeting there works - there’s no need to veer trolley-like from insights to budgeting in Trends just yet. If that were to happen we’d end up with thin functionality for everything. So, in my view, the team should make what’s here excellent and best in class: then go to budgeting.
Until then you’ll always have the budgeting features in Summary!
So everything is interrelated. I don’t, for example, use budgets, but I know loads of folk do. I do, though, look back on past expenditure to see where I could make changes to bills or other outgoings. Which is clearly related, so yes, I take the point.
My main issue was that Monzo has suffered, I think, from lack of focus. Summary tried to do too many things and arguably didn’t do any of them particularly well. So my point here is that - related or not - make the analytics and data functionality that’s being built here excellent and world class. Then do budgeting. I fear if they’re done together then a mess will ensue (again).
Well said, and much agreed!
budgeting
noun
the process of calculating how much money you must earn or save during a particular period of time, and of planning how you will spend it
To my mind, budgeting is a bit stricter than trends.
Budgeting is, “I must not spend more than £20 on coffee in the work canteen each week,” whereas trends is more, “oh hell, I spent £200 in that canteen last month, maybe I should do something else.”
I cba budgeting properly, but I’m quite happy for trends to nudge my behaviour in a better direction.
But surely you need to know the past to improve things in the future
Or have I been watching too much History Channel? 
I think one leads to the other.
Lots of people don’t realise how much they spend on coffee or parking because it’s a couple of quid a day.
Then you get to the end of the month and you’ve spent £100 but you don’t realise.
Trends will alert you to this. Then maybe you then have a budget for next month or are just more conscious of it.
I budget quite religiously, but separately I still appreciate insight on where my money is going inside each pot. That allows me to see if I can reduce spending, allow for a bigger purchase or new subscription etc.
Erm, how are algorithms going to project future spend without having data to train on? And if it’s gonna be personal, it needs to look at your data!
In any case, I think we’re at risk of conflating a bunch of things: a) presenting historic data to users in a way that is useful and allows them to make actionable and informed decisions; b) projecting future financial wellness based on historical behaviour (or specified interventions); and, c) setting budgets and reviewing performance against them.
I think we’re still on a). I kinda want that nailed before we move on!
Agreed. Use historic, factual data as ground zero. Then build on that for forecasting and budgeting.
I have no idea how they’d use my historic spending to make predictions, my spending is very erratic
That’s the word I’m after!
Short, medium and long term, please.
Short: show me upcoming (committed) transactions and estimates of spend based on previous data for coming months (or other periods). Allow me to model what happens if I don’t have that coffee or get the cheaper broadband…
Medium: what’s my financial situation looking like in a few years time? How can I make changes to save for that house deposit, new car, university tuition…?
Long: what’s retirement looking like? How will I provide for my heirs?
Some specific feedback for @benstrak, @avb and @tjvr:
I have a connected account for a credit card. That card is a long term 0% deal that I’m paying down over time. I’d created a specific category for “Repayments” that I use for money going to it.
The introduction of Trends has meant that my category has been overwritten with Transfer. This probably works for most cases, but not for mine (there’s no spending on the card so there’s no double counting to avoid).
This wouldn’t be a problem if I could search for all transactions and bulk change category. I can’t, so I’m going through 100s in my spare time updating them. (Overpaying by £1/day was a good idea at the time 
).
There’s another aspect of Trends that we are not specifically talking about here: the ability to integrate all payments across different timeframes. Currently everything is very focussed on the per-month level, but many things (car insurance, home insurance, car service) if you’re not doing a direct debit are paid yearly. And then there are large ad-hoc expenses like holidays. Trends I think helps us to stand back and get the entire picture, which I think helps a lot.
I totally agree with the sentiment.
But this, I think, isn’t quite true yet. Trends is still very much in the monthly model - but hopefully will come out of that soon! (I desperately want this to be true).
And, following from this, I’ve gone to delete my custom Savings category as there’s now a proper Monzo one:
It would be super helpful that there was an option to move all transactions in this category to another one when deleting, rather than just leaving the legacy one there.
And a late edit, rather than a new post: can we have search for connected accounts please? For these accounts, we can’t easily find transactions that need to be updated, let alone bulk update them!
Oh I think we can absolutely agree on that. It read a bit like you didn’t see the utility of showing past spending in the app (or really got some of the nuance around smart predictions). But you clearly do!
I’m on a bit of a detailed feedback mission today.
So Pots categorisation!
They’re currently all classified as Transfers, except for automatic roundups which are Savings.
That’s all good, except that I have two models for my Pots: savings one (not third party saving pots, but ones I have in Monzo for easy access emergencies), then set aside pots (money I think I’m gonna spend that month). Transfers is okay for the latter, but not for the former. And going back to change them is painful.
Suggestion: can we have a default category per Pot when you create it, please? And if you change that category afterwards, you’re asked if you want to go back and change all historic transactions to that category?
British Sarcasm, I know what I signed up to still waiting for the improvements, still waiting for Monzo to change with the time, change what is a different place when this launched
British Sarcasm, I know what I signed up to still waiting for the improvements, still waiting for Monzo to change with the time, change what is a different place when this launched.
