Useful uses for Monzo Plus Live Data Export? Share your tips!

Interesting, my data doesn’t have the money in/out bits yet. Wonder if it’s a phased roll out.

Does yours go back to all your historical data or just since a certain date?

I don’t have it yet either

I’ve got it on mine but only noticed it a few days ago

There seems to be quite a few similar threads on here for the live data export, but this seemed like the most appropriate one to post in.

The Christmas break has given me a nice opportunity to crack on with building my spreadsheet/ finance dashboard. One of the biggest challenges for me was the fact that whilst Monzo is my financial hub, it’s not where I do all of my spending and saving, so to make this useful I needed to combine Monzo’s data with other sources.

The first thing I had to do was bring in my American Express spending. I fortunately already log all of my American Express transactions in a separate Google Sheet in order to power my IFTTT recipe that automatically moves money into a pot every time I spend and also runs a coin jar for my Amex spend (for the record this is Android-only but importing AMEX statements should get you a similar result, albeit with delayed data). I’ve categorised all the merchants that appear and making use of UNIQUE and a VLOOKUP means I only need to update these whenever I spend somewhere new.

I’ve then imported this data into my dashboard and combined it with my Monzo data to give me a true view of my spending across both Monzo and American Express building a monthly breakdown and category chart along the way.

The other thing I’ve been able to build is an overview of my savings and investments. All of my savings accounts are younger than my Monzo account, and all of my balances have been funded from Monzo. By setting up a separate category for each account it’s possible to accurately track the balance of external savings. To take this further, I’ve also added an interest sheet so that I can manually log any interest that has been paid into my accounts.

I’ve also got a graph that shows my salary, spending and saving over time, although this one isn’t too useful if you occasionally buy things for people and are then paid back e.g. expensive holidays as it gets thrown off a little.

Having this information means that I now have an overview of where my money is and how the proportion of money in my accounts has shifted over time. For example you can see the point where I realised I should put more than the initial £1 into my Help to buy ISA. You can also see where I realised the 0.5% I was getting from Marcus was pants and investing in stocks and shares would be better.


I’m really happy with what I’ve built so far, but I’m constantly looking back at the sheet to make improvements. It feels like I’ll never be ‘finished’.

Anybody else been using the break as an opportunity to work on theirs?

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Impressive!

I’d be able to build an excel financial empire using a combination of Monzo, manual data entry and offline imports of other bank account data.

At the moment, I use YNAB to do all of that with forecasting and I’d prefer to build my own sheet and not pay YNAB.

But Monzo Joint account used :cry:

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Have to say, I’m loving all the hidden little features in Google Sheets. Here I’ve used the SPARKLINE function to create a mini pulse for each of my accounts.

Is it useless? Yes.
Does it look cool? Yes.

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I’ve been doing less because I haven’t opened my laptop in a week!

But I’m going to revamp them when I’m back to work and I will be adding SPARKLINE for all my pots!

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This is great. I sometimes change the names of my pots on occasion which makes it much harder to track individual pot balances. Is your plan to just stick with the same pot names or have you got a different solution?

Something useful that I’ve recently added to my dashboard is a tracker for the returns on my investments;


I found that trading212 doesn’t make it very easy to see the trend when you have a large portfolio, so I manually plot midnight return values. They’re working on adding a CSV export that will hopefully allow me to automate this.

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Yeah that’s the plan. In theory you could create a table with the columns, historical pot name and current pot name, then you could run a VLOOKUP on each line of your Monzo Transactions sheet to find the current pot name which should help your sheet handle name changes a little easier with only a tiny bit of manual work.

On a completely separate note whenever I submit my expenses to work I have to fill in a spreadsheet with each expense listed. I’ve just built a way to automate the sheet generation using the data I’m combining from Monzo and AMEX.

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Now I’m back at desk, I’m revamping. Cleary I didn’t listen to the wise man that said “Just because you can make a graph, doesn’t mean you should”

I’ve taken the totals off because I’m old fashioned and don’t really like to broadcast money, plus I don’t want to offend anyone.

  1. What I spend through each pay period. This is everything that goes out of my account. My bills haven’t really changed in this time, but my spending goes up. I seem to get a certain point and go “that’s enough now” but I need to stop a few hundred quid before that! I think the bigger peak is a holiday inbetween lockdowns and the recent 4 months, I seem to just want to spend every penny.

  2. I set myself a budget for the month, divide it by day and then fail miserably at sticking to it. I used to be a lot better but because I now have some more money in pots, I know if I go over this it doesn’t matter.

  3. Variance of money in and out of my account. Fairly flat recently. Everything I get I spend, this needs to change!

  4. Daily spend. Couple of big peaks but quite a few days with zero spend which I’m always trying to increase.

  5. The rolling balance of my savings pot, taken a dip but building again

  6. Spend per category for this pay period and the last. I need to redo this because otherwise on day 1 it’s huge vs nothing, so really it needs to only show like for like. I might do that tomorrow as I’ve probably spent enough of my working day doing this already today!

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Do you include your money going into Pots as part of your budget allowance, out of interest?

Nice charts, I love the flat line variance chart. I feel your pain there too.

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Nope. Just my actual spend. After you helped me with excluding the pots, this makes more sense and has helped me make more graphs. Just what was needed!

This is what I was forgetting to do with my daily budget app. Spending £3.60, with 40p going into a pot but recording £3.60 spend and wondering why I was so off at the end of the month.

Only took about a year to realise…

Definitely true, however my counter is that I don’t know whether a graph is going to be useful until I’ve made it haha.

They’ve added CSV export to Trading212, so that’s my project for today!

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I don’t know if its already been mentioned yet as this thread is pretty long. But has anyone devised a solution to using split categories? I’ve been puzzling over it for a while but can’t seem to make it work.

Are you just wanting to get the names and values separate so you can do more analysis?

I haven’t split any transactions, how does it come through on the sheet?

You might be able to do LEFT and get the text before it uses whatever characters to split things.

Yes I found a way! It’s a little janky in places but it’s the best I can think without using scripts.

Let me dig out the comment I made about it and will repost it.

Depends on how you may later utilise the data as to how useful it is, but yeah.

So both @revels and I have indeed had a go at this before.

Take a look at this thread:

It does mean that the data for one transaction is split along columns, so basically any further analysis of your data needs to look into all the columns where data is.

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Theirs a easier way if you change the formula it’ll separate it into different areas

Would love to hear what that method is? The =SPLIT function should do a good amount of that, and I can’t see another way that doesn’t potentially break the sheet