We've Added Some New Categories

I think youve come across two already well talked about issues…

  1. no ability to split transactions into 2 or more categories
  2. Lack of actual custom categories for granular budgeting

Both id love to see improvements on :pray:

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I think everyone had their own workaround, but that’s the problem, it’s a workaround!

I put spends for my cat under “family” and house improvement spend under “general”. If they’re wanting set categories in order to generate aggregated data then there’s 2 examples of how the data isn’t necessarily accurate.

Seems like they have a couple of options. Make tagging a better tool for more granular budgeting or add in some new categories (in my case “pets” and “home”) or even give everyone 2-3 customisable categories in addition to the set ones.

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The suggestion to put custom categories “under” default categories (in order to not disrupt ‘automagic’ but easily confused metrics) has been suggested for years, and shot down as often as custom categories in general.

Shame it’s dismissed so readily.

I can see the business case to have the same categories for everyone so they can aggregate data, but if many customers are saying they use a previously unused category for a totally different spend intended for that category then their aggregated data is going to be incorrect and useless.

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This ^^ I currently use family for pints just as an example :laughing:

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Totally, I can confirm we’re indeed working towards covering this and provide with either custom categories or a way bigger list of categories, in any case we’re aiming for it to be something that most people won’t really need to tinker too much with to get value out of it… just to keep things simple.

@vuokko (our Design Director for the team we call “Main accounts”) is putting the first pieces together of a series of changes that will revamp categories, pulse and Summary. She’ll be sharing updates as things get clearer and more people get involved but I can already tell you it’s gonna be great. We’re super excited about it.

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Hooray. Really pleased to hear about this. Thanks for the update Hugo. Either option sounds good to me and really nice to see progress on this.

I like that spending now shows automatically all the categories you have spent in that month, that’s an improvement too. Not sure there’s any point in the ‘more’ link there now, as it is guaranteed to show only those categories you haven’t spent in, which is not very useful. Perhaps if adding more categories you could get rid of that ‘more’ line as it’s not going to be practical to show all the unused ones, and not very useful either?

Great Hugo, thanks for the update pal :clap:

Fantastic, great get confirmation.

And fantastic that these are being thought of together. As I found out when I had a go you can’t really do them in isolation…

I do have a lingering thought about the utility of fixed categories, though. I didn’t go there in my mock ups but I wonder if some comparators with similar users might (with consent) be interesting. (But then I suppose that brings up problematic concepts of similar users, potentially bringing things like gender or age into the app which may well be undesirable).

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Hooray ^^ Thats great news. As someone that knows what they want, I do hope that tinkering will be possible though!

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I’ve been a very keen Monzo user / investor for a long time now, I ask for one thing, please give me a PET category lol PLEASE :pray:

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Any update on the Charity category?

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Yes! A few of us have been working on it during the last couple of months of Monzo TIme. I think we’ll be releasing soon, not sure if it’ll go first to Monzo Labs though, I’ll keep you updated :slight_smile:

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:soon:

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Are there any other categories that will be added at some point soon? I could really use a pets category, at the moment I’m using expenses category for my pet which is just terrible and my dog finds this disrespectful

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A charity category was added in the latest beta update :slight_smile:

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The main category I’ve got my fingers crossed :crossed_fingers: for aside from the upcoming charity one is a “household” category.

Kinda would like to see “gifts” too, although not a major biggie for me as money comes out of a gift pot for presents, so I end up excluding them from the Summary so it doesn’t mess up the “you’re set to have £xx left over” feature.

For reasons above, I guess we’ll never get that “Drinking” category that probably should be there if overall spending was considered. Eating out again…

I think the current “Bills” category should be renamed “Household” - everything I can think of which would currently be categorised as “Bills” could also be categorised as “Household”. The introduction of a “Committed Spend” toggle would make things like Netflix easier to categorise too (Committed Spend toggle + Entertainment category).

Household is bleach and washing powder to me, not bills

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