There is a problem with Flex and it’s integration with Trends. If you spend £75 in a shop and flex it then you are automatically re credited and then debuted £25.
From a budgeting point of view this is really unhelpful because it looks like you have only spent £25 and therefore trends does not reflect what you are buying in a month.
I would like trends to show that I have bought something for £75 and be able to ignore how it is repaid (irrelevant budgeting).
This might work for some people but definitely not for me and I will either cancel plus or stop using flex.
From my view, it’s working as it is designed, because you have only spent £25. If you paid off flex it would be £75, but you’ve not done that.
You could exclude the flex transfers (I think) or make sure the initial transaction isn’t excluded from summary? And then exclude the payment to flex otherwise you’d have spent £100.
Technically you have only spent £25 though in that particular period. I don’t use trends but wouldn’t the next month then show the next £25 and so on, until it’s paid off in full
I agree with @Andymarkp (for Flexed transactions from the current account at least).
At the moment, I work around it by recategorising the ‘refund’ transfer from Flex as ‘transfers’ and repayments as a ‘Flex Repayment’ category that’s excluded from Trends spending, though.
Bit of a pain in the proverbial to remember to do it manually though.
That’s a nice workaround, but unfortunately only works for payments that you’ve flexed after paying with your normal debit card… For payments that you make using your flex card number (which skip the main account), the only transaction that ever appears in trends is the repayment… So they’re effectively completely excluded from trends now…
As fas as I’m concerned, the trends transactions should work / appear just the same as any credit card from an external bank that you add to your trends… Transactions to and from flex (i.e. flexing an existing payment and getting money back, or paying off a flex payment) should be categorised as transfers. And payments made directly from the flex card should use the appropriate category, and appear in trends the same as any other credit card payment, at the point at which the payment was made.