Use transaction time to split eating out into breakfast, lunch and dinner

Hi,

It would be neat to use the transaction time to provide further insights in your Eating Out category by grouping transactions into meal categories (e.g. breakfast, lunch, dinner, midnight snack) based on time periods during the day.

For example if the Eating Out transaction occurred between 5am - 10.30am, then classify it as Breakfast.

Cheers,
Raven

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and an “all day breakfast” ? :grin:

Disregarding those whom may chose to partake in an American Brunch or Indian Tiffin I would assume the typical British meals would be

Breakfast
Elevenses
Lunch
Afternoon Tea
High Tea
Dinner
Supper

Though as one is not going to consume all of these options to ignore elevenses and to amalgamate Afternoon Tea and High Tea into one category of Tea would surely suffice

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After 3 or 4 main meals a day the thought of a midnight snack conjurs up images of the Monty Python sketch where the diner consumes a waffer thin mint after his meal

I think adding so many ‘meals’ (particularly estimating what time of day to assign them to), would be troublesome.

I do however think that it would be useful to separate Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and estimate them using time-boxing :watch: but allow us to re-assign them the way we currently can with categories if we don’t quite agree with the estimate.

It would be useful for example, because I could then track the silly amount of money I spend buying lunch at work every day :hotdog:

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Just to mention, you can already track your spend by location (I find using the start of my office’s postcode works best) & / or by tagging your lunch transactions with your :hotdog: emoji.

But it’s not possible to get those tags assigned automatically & I do need this feature so that I can exclude my coffee purchases from the search results

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I’m pretty sure I read somewhere about someone asking for Coffee as a filter, which would be magic!:coffee:

Also, thanks for the info, I’ve not read too much into all of the app filters, as I don’t want to disappoint myself too much, alas I’m an Android user. So it could be some time before I have that ability!

Though I’m waiting on tenterhooks since @tristan announced in the blog two days ago about the upcoming 1.2 release for Android. I feel like there should be a countdown timer in the app! I’m on edge.

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Yeah I add the emoji to my transactions manually at the moment, although Monzo does automatically tag transactions at places like Costa & Starbucks with :coffee:, this does cause issues when the wrong tag’s assigned though, as the Monzo tags can’t be removed.

It would also be useful to be able to add these notes from the lockscreen when the notification arrives -

According to the roadmap it’s not long until you have search too :pray:

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I remember someone saying that you could search “lunch” and any transactions in the category eating out at lunch time would come up. I could never get it to work…

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You can, but first you have to add it as note against each transaction.

Currently it’s a manual process. However, this idea would automatically add said note.

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No this wasn’t using a note. It was picking out the transaction that took place between say 12pm-2pm and using the search term lunch it would bring these up.

  • this Stuart ?
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This is what I mean!

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Wow i didnt know this was possible! It works for me (without notes) - searching for lunch or breakfast returns time bounded eating out transactions. Unfortunately not much insight from that, just a list but still interesting

lol, nice to know supper, dinner and tea are the same search categories :wink:

Just checked again and it does work!

Looks like Monzo have already played around with this idea as seen in this video. I’ve preset it to load at the correct point.

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I expect this was taken out due to the fluidity of times that people may eat their meals throughout the day. For instance some days I have breakfast at anywhere from 6 am to 11 am, which could get categorised as elevenses. I would likely then also have a late lunch and late dinner.

The other hurdle would become apparent when the merchant fails to make the online transaction at the actual time of purchase, rather than several days later at a different time of day.

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Searching for more discussion about this idea again today, I’ve just come across a couple of posts from the Monzo team with their thoughts about similar functionality -