We've Added Some New Categories

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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@edo1493 This is proper trolling :rofl:

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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. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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As someone in the “without custom categories categories are completely worthless to me” camp, let me give some examples of how my existing budgeting categories are set up. Here’s (some of) the categories an sub categories I use in YNAB 4. You can view all major categories as a pie chart, and slicking on one of the segments will drill down to the subcategories. @CraigR’s subcategory proposal offers most of the functionality of fully custom categories, and doesn’t require Monzo to worry about adding flexibility to their summary screen in the event a user wants to write a really long category name, or have 100 different top-level categories all called ‘Cheese’, or similar weirdness.

For those who have never even considered ‘budgeting’ before then a fixed inflexible set of arbitrary categories are no better or worse than any other set of arbitrary categories. But for anyone who already has a budget, or who wants to take their Monzo-based budgeting and use it to actually change their spending habits, they run into the “that’s too complicated for you to handle” wall. It may sound like harsh criticism, but being repeatedly told you’re not clever enough to handle organising your own finances is also pretty harsh.

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I interpret this as being less about users not being clever & more about keeping the app simple -

The app’s probably never going to include all of the functionality that ‘power users’ want (that’s why the API is great - because it enables developers to build that functionality, like YNAB, for a more niche audience) but obviously it will carry on improving.

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Pre-set categories and custom categories are not a mutually exclusive either/or. I don’t think anyone asking for custom categories has demanded the existing categories be wipedclean for everyone.
With the existing categories as defaults, categories will only be as ‘non-simple’ as user’s actively make them. Removal of options does not imply simplicity, only inflexibility.

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Totally agree :disappointed_relieved:

Nope, I know this was being looked at a while ago and I’ll follow up to check where it got to :+1:

As someone with little (and remote) family, and a low budget for personal care, meh.
Can hiding a category be an option?

Though I’m more miffed if I’m going to have to manually re-categorize Tesco to-and-from transport again when I get petrol later this month.

That could be automated (for pay-at-pump at least) by detecting transactions that had a different pre-authorisation charge (vs. normal in-store transactions which will match the presentment amount).

Automated Fuel Dispensers have a different MasterCard scheme code to other fuel purchases so those transactions should be easily categorised.

Use Asda for petrol?

Tesco, pay @ pump
Maybe they have fixed it (Morrisons example) and I haven’t noticed, or at least it looks fixable now (I don’t think it was previously)

Was it necessary to takeaway ‘Cash’ as a category? Couldn’t you have added the ‘Finances’ category without removing an existing one?

Cash withdrawals and finances are different. Cash is physical and offline, while transfers/savings/investments are electronic and online.

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Here’s my thoughts on that -

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We don’t always need to hear your thoughts @alexs.

In this instance I’m interested in hearing from Monzo as on the other thread all we’ve heard from is you, which I acknowledge, but you don’t represent Monzo.

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Sure :slightly_smiling_face: in the meantime I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts on whether I’m missing anything there!

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You’re not missing anything, just that I want to have my questions answered by @hugo @bea or another member of staff involved in the decision making process for removing the Cash category. By all means, if you can use any leverage you have to get one of them to respond this would equally be appreciated

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