Vacation period

Feedback & Ideas
1

Hi Monzo!

I will pitch you a quick idea and might elaborate later with specifics (my background in development is screaming me to do it but my sleeping schedule is really against it).

Context
I was with my girlfriend here in London but for 12 days I was on annual leave and my plan was to disconnect completely (which sometimes also means becoming a little bit reckless on spending). Two things happened during that time that I thought should be addressed:

  • Thing 1:
    The normal places to which I go and buy food, as an example, were correctly tagged as “groceries”, based on my previous classifications and the nature of the store (props on that feature working great), but because I set my budget and I want to be able to track properly my expenses, I had to change every single one of them, manually, to “Travel” (suitcase, you get the idea).

A decent workaround, spending targets were saved, but now whenever I go to Sainsbury’s to buy food it goes directly into Orange Suitcase category.

  • Thing 2:
    In my head, as a Data Analyst (nerd, OFC), every time I made a 50 quid purchase on food I thought “Oh Jeez, I can only imagine how Monzo might interpret this if they refine my expending patterns, everything will be biased HARD”. We do have ways to deal with outliers, and I can completely imagine you have those in place, but I do travel every month to see my girlfriend or for work and things can be harder to decode.

Ok Francesco, I get it, massive problem, what now?
I am glad you asked

What about being able to set up a “Grace period” or “Off period”, so Monzo does not get any weird ideas about my spending during that time, and I get to have more precise tracking.

Let us say I know I would be on some special period for 5 days, I set up start and end dates, now Monzo knows any changes I make are to be taken as “a one-off” and mostly ignore them or classify things differently. More advanced but let us say I want to classify everything during those 5 days in my “holidays” budget for the month, I won’t have to do it manually and I might be able to do a payment request at the end of the period to the peeps that joined me (think of group of friends on a trip).

The last bit was already mentioned in your Bill Split session at the Monzo HQ (old one) but for sure this could make a stronger case for splitting.

Monzo, show me some teeth, you hate it? you like it? what would you do?

If I get some traction might even scope it out myself as a personal project

See you around!

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2

Hi @Goldmember you’ll be pleased to know that there are plans in place to allow you to manually turn on holiday mode for staycations and when it doesn’t detect you’re abroad (travel reports doesn’t currently work in joint accounts either :disappointed:)

In answer to your second point. I may not be fully understanding the issue but you should be able to use exclude from summary to exclude any big one off spends

2 Likes
3

@glasgow Thank you for the answer mate.

Manually turn on staycations is great, but would also be good to have a “special period” feature, for instance, I might have a client over and expense everything on my company, but might be tracked as “this is just a big spender now, Francesco control yourself”. I guess it is just a technicality at this point.

Not really issues or questions, but more like setting up the context to pitch the short idea.

Thank you for the help!

1 Like
4

another wild feature idea but… maybe your calendar could be used as a reference for something like this? link your calendar to Monzo (via some other service, or webhooks… might be too much for IFTTT?) and if you have an event with a location over multiple days, transactions should not be classed as your regular spending