We're working on a new look for the Monzo app

[o99]

Like several others in this thread I have come to like the Summary tab and find it very useful. I find pretty much everything in the tab useful and after using it for a while find it easy to use. However, I do remember that when I first tried to use it I had significant difficulty understanding it, in particular understanding the difference in behaviour depending on whether or not you have set a monthly budget. I had to search the forum for explanations of how it behaves. This shouldn’t be necessary and surely puts a lot of people off (most people won’t put in the effort to understand it that I and other forum users are willing to do).

Here are some of the things I wrote last year just after I had more or less figured it out but still had some uncertainty and was also trying to help someone else understand it (this is perhaps more useful to Monzo than my thoughts on it after using it for several months).

Summary balance incorrect

I think the summary tab is really confusing. My current assumption is: If you have not set a spending budget: Left to spend = [Main account balance] - [Committed spending that is so far unspent in current pay cycle] If you are using spending budget: Left to spend = [Spending Budget] - [Money spent so far in current pay cycle that’s not considered committed spending] Is this correct @BethS ?

Summary balance incorrect

I believe the thinking is there are broadly two groups of users, with each group having a distinct approach or distinct needs to money management/budgeting and they are trying to satisfy both. One approach (your approach) is for your total budget to be implicitly defined by the amount of money in your account at the start of the month. To make summary work for you, you need to avoid explicitly specifying an overall budget. But I think (although not entirely sure) that you can still use category…

So I think Monzo either need to do a better job explaining or signposting how to use the existing Summary tab from within the app, and/or think up a more intuitive approach to spending analytics and budgeting (I don’t know what that would be myself).