Has there been any progress on fixing that bug where tapping a category after sending a payment doesnt actually set the category?
Feel like new categories are very similar to what Emma had except that there is still nothing for income/salary.
I don’t think I want custom categories but I would like categories to work more intelligently with tags.
There are still a lot of occasions when a wrong category would be auto selected and I would like mass edit along with if I edit a category app should learn that what I had tagged in that category before and present me tags to choose. Couple more like Charity and Income would make Monzo options great for me.
I think this would give uses quite a bit of customisation. Plus search on Android needs to improved to make use of categories properly.
Emma Categories:
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To me this is ideal.
I don’t want too many categories, otherwise they become worthless - you’ll have a category per transaction! But the ones that have been added are exactly the ones I’ve felt have been missing when I’ve tried to categorise my transactions in the week or so since I joined. Immediately they felt like they were needed. And changing Cash to Finances, too, really helps.
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Great news. Not perfect but you acknowledge that which is brilliant.
When should we see these? Currently I don’t.
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When can we expect to see these new categories? Currently I am not seeing them.
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Let’s assume that custom categories can only exist as children of Monzo’s pre-defined existing categories - this sort of answers some of those questions automatically.
A new screen, or tab; perhaps under Account screen? Tide has a separate screen for this in a menu somewhere, but new categories can be added from the “Assign Category” action/UI.
Less time than typing out #tags on every transaction 
No, they inherit from their parent categories.
Revert to parent category, probably.
No.
Can they see current top-level categorisation as they are now? Maybe yes/maybe no…
Parent categories would still be used.
Just one level. Just to keep it simple
There is already a limit for Pots purely based on the UI, so just pick another arbitrary limit for Sub-Categories? (N.B. it would be nice if Pots had their own screen so this limit could be removed)
Its usefulness to customers will vary from person-to-person; just like Monzo.me, or Spending/Targets, or Overdrafts…
Probably only a handful under each category, from what I’ve read here. Transport could have Fuel, Maintenance/Repairs, Bus Tickets, Train Tickets. Finance could have Transfers, Savings, Gifts. Bills could have Gas/Electricity, Water, Broadband. And so on 
Using parent categories, primarily. But if we can filter and view transactions by custom categories like we can with #tags now, or include the subcategories in other views that use Categories, then they become much more useful for people (also see above).
Parent categories can still do this. But on the other side of this - if we only have vague categories to pick from, isn’t there a possibility that the comparison with other people becomes meaningless, too?
For example, how do you compare a car user in a semi-rural area spending £150 a month in the Transport category, with a public transport user in a big city spending £80 a month in Transport?
Based on a lot of comments here about what people want, it seems custom sub-categories offers the best of both worlds - to customers and Monzo. Those who want flexibility in categorising transactions will make the small time investment to set them up, and those people who are happy with the default top-level ones will carry on as normal.
I don’t have all the answers, and I appreciate it’s a big issue. Just my 2p
Alternatively; if #tags were more of a first-class citizen in the app or had some more focus in the UI, there might not be a need for custom categories? Things like reports (totals spent), lists of tags used, select from existing/suggest tags when adding them to a transaction, and advanced filter search for transactions.
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Whether or not it’s a ‘bug’, it’s frustrating to be given the option to categorize a payment only for it to fail every time. You mention at the bottom of your post 6 months ago that it’ll be fixed. Has that changed?
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I think that’s splitting hairs. It might not technically be a bug, but we are presented with a screen, and when we tap on an option, we expect that to be remembered. Regardless of the technical explanation it looks and behaves like a bug to the user. It is certainly not expected behaviour!
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With charitable donations included on a self assessment tax return each year it is a shame Monzo omitted the addition of a Charity category.
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We should be able to release custom categories later over the summer.
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Couldn’t agree more with this. The data is always going to be skewed, due to items being fudged into categories that aren’t particularly relevant.
If it’s expected behaviour, then please don’t give us the option to categorise on the payment success screen.
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When you have a large enough dataset, the odd discrepancy doesn’t effect the data. They should be able to make sure that they only share insights that are accurate - & avoid offering insights that can’t be relied upon.
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Really useful post and well explained. It’s hard to make something that works well for everyone from people who want something simple to people who want control over every feature. I think you’ve got the right balance and I love the idea of expense and holiday toggles too! Thanks for the details.
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A Charity category would be indeed amazing!
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Personal care is useful, finances and family have no value to me, so I’ll be abusing them for lunch and car maintenance or something like that.
I’ve said it many times but I don’t think custom categories need to be complicated at all, they don’t need to change anything for people who don’t want to use them, adding them will clean up the stats on the default categories (I can’t be the only one making the best out of the defaults that don’t reflect my spending habits) they could still work in the summary and you can just ignore them if you want to send out stats of me vs the world.
before someone says use hashtags, I do and it isn’t the same, I don’t get a nice clear total of £45 on #beer I just get a list of times I typed #beer which is more manual that selecting a category (which I do for every transaction anyway)
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How do I like this more than once?
Emma does it again!
I think Monzo will have to buy Emma and just merge the functionality.
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Who knows, maybe Emma will buy Monzo. 
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