Trends... While We're Waiting - What Next?

[Peter_G]

While we’re waiting until next week for @avb, @lj and @RoreEricaOkoh to stop teasing us drop the epic Trends update next week (and for the team to get better, obvs), I thought we could entertain ourselves by asking two questions: where does the app need improvement? What next for Trends?

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Question 1: If Monzo could only iterate / fix / improve ONE part of the app, what would it be?

• The Feed / transaction screen / search (inc for connected accounts)
• The Accounts screen (the one you get when you pull the card down)
• Settings / App Preferences
• Budgeting / Future Period Cashflow Projections
• Trends / Backwards looking analysis
• Social
• Paid-for features
• Payments Tab
• Social features (split bill, shared tabs etc)
• Help
• Something else (tell us what!)

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Question 2: Assuming an expansive definition of Trends, what 3 things do you want?

• Merchant view
• Four-week views
• Financial (or custom year) views
• Custom Periods
• Create category groups (so spending, bills, savings/investments etc instead of spending and excluded)
• Accurate payday (resets when you get paid)
• Cashflow analysis / future periods projection (inc ability to add expected future transactions to model future months’ outgoings)
• Category Budgeting
• Search box in Trends
• Drill down from years to months to days or from categories to individual transactions
• Set up future goals and funding schedule automatically
• More categories
• More connected accounts
• Manual accounts / transactions

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Question 3: Same thing again, but pick everything you want!

• Merchant view
• Four-week views
• Financial (or custom year) views
• Custom Periods
• Create category groups (so spending, bills, savings/investments etc instead of spending and excluded)
• Accurate payday (resets when you get paid)
• Cashflow analysis / future periods projection (inc ability to add expected future transactions to model future months’ outgoings)
• Category Budgeting
• Search box in Trends
• Drill down from years to months to days or from categories to individual transactions
• Set up future goals and funding schedule automatically
• More categories
• More connected accounts
• Manual accounts / transactions

Usual disclaimer: just for fun. And the chances that this poll will influence next week’s release are, well, zero. Sorry!

[coffeemadman (Jonathon 🏳️‍🌈)]

I would love manual accounts for other things like loans for example, with trends/information about total debts/assets, similar to YNAB.

[dinosm]

It seems my top votes concur more or less with the majority - future forecasts based on known patterns and repeat transactions would be the best thing ever.

[nathanthomson8 (Nathan)]

Bill splits and add to tab for connected accounts please and thanks!

[Peter_G]

Idle musing:

<boolean name="investments_enabled" value="false" />

Could we be getting connected investment accounts?

(I mean probably not, given that Monzo is probably building its own (for some value of its own) investment platform. But I muse nevertheless).

[duncang (Duncan)]

It’s funny how “accurate payday” floats to the top in the third poll, but not the second. I suspect when people have fewer votes they preference larger things and just assume that small (but exceptionally annoying) feature tweeks will just get done and are thus not worthy of a vote.

[Peter_G]

Despite having started the poll, it took me a lot of thinking about what my three priority things would be. And I’m still not sure I’ve got them right.

I think my criteria were broadly “what are the things that would make a significant impact or be transformative?” and “what can I work around or otherwise find a hack for so, while not perfect or delivering joy, I can deprioritise?”.

On that basis I went for big ticket items: future periods, category groups and manual accounts. Each of them would really add so much value for me.

That’s not to say that important stuff like resetting pay periods should be forgotten. In fact, it’s my current hobby horse.

So many of the excellent things that Monzo does (get paid early, left to spend etc) just need to be pushed further to bring joy instead of grit. So many things that Monzo builds don’t play well with each other: get paid early breaks the “days remaining” left to spend or budgeting figures; Monzo payments didn’t/don’t go into committed spend and can’t/couldn’t be paid from bills pots…

Taking that little extra step, making everything work at a coherent whole, finding that little gloss to spark joy is so so so important and will yield dividends (over time, literally). But they can’t be costed so aren’t done.

The accurate payday is an excellent example. A really good, joy inducing, thing would have been to make periods reset automatically (or even on a button press) when your salary is received, even if you haven’t reached the end of the specified pay cycle.

Instead, we’re left with nice, functional, but uninspiring silos of features where we can see the joins between different product teams.