We've Added Some New Categories

You get most of the benefits out of Monzo when you try not to use cash, otherwise you start to loose the insights on what your money gets spent on and at what merchants. Monzo know this and the service is built around this data. In my opinion having a cash category defeates the purpose of having the categories in the first place. Cash withdrawals are best tagged as the category they are spent on, otherwise your spending data is skewed on the method of how you paid not on what it was :monzo:

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I agree with the Smart Banking principle that is geared towards digital-only offerings. However, currency is still the fundamental M0 money in our economy & will be for the foreseeable future.

Monzo has the option to photograph receipts for a reason, as well as hashtags & notes, so that customers who use cash as their prerogative can do so without losing the benefits of spending analytics. The general user should not be discouraged from using cash when it realistically may only make up sub-10% (still materially significant enough to be worthy of a category) of their transactions.
Rather Monzo should be trying to do what RBS are doing such as using technology to enhance digital receipts:
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Also, Starling for example have partnered with the Post Office for cash deposits presumably because they recognise cash is still important.

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Out of interest, what insights does the cash category give you? Presumably you don’t set a Target for cash withdrawals or check the total amount of money that you’ve withdrawn each month in the Summary, since that probably doesn’t give you much information about where the money actually went..

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Think i answered this in our other discussion on this, but generally largely I care about the top line total of how much Cash I’ve withdrawn from my Monzo account each month. I don’t set targets for cash - I only set an overall monthly budget target - as I only use cash when I feel necessary. When i do use cash, I add hashtags, receipts and notes so I know exactly what I spent it on.

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I see! How do you use that information?

I’m asking because I can definitely see the use case for breaking these transactions down, I’m just wondering how useful the top level category itself is..

If it’s any help, you can still find out your cash spending by searching for “atm” and also tag it how you wish. That way both metrics are included. (Monzo search is underrated) you could even search between date ranges and for “atm” with the total for that period shown at the bottom.
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It allows me to see how much as a proportion spending in cash accounts for in my overall monthly spending portfolio.

@Jackcrwhitney while the search tool is good, i didn’t have to do this before they removed the Cash category for no good reason. Also, ATM search will give me a range and total but it won’t be the same as seeing the Cash category at a glance within the Spending Analytics tab.

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Well, with all this talk of a cashless society, it’s interesting to see how much I still end up using - usually about £50 a month. I also tag them with the currency so I can split out the foreign ones, which tend to be a lot higher, depending on the country.

Putting a different category on a cash withdrawal would be impossible for me as I rarely spend it all on one thing.

Having read this thread, I think Monzo are missing a trick by not doing a similar thing to Moneyhub, where there are plenty of categories in two levels, and you can add custom ones. It doesn’t feel complex or crowded, and it doesn’t break the reporting. What’s not to like?

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Also, it wouldn’t overcomplicate the app or negatively impact the experience of people who didn’t want to use them.

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On the flip side adding features that the majority of users don’t want to use probably isn’t desirable either..


Please spare me replies about other features in the app that you think most users don’t use - I’ve seen those comments already & it doesn’t help with this discussion.

I had a cash target, so if I withdraw too much cash I get warned. On my old account i’d forget about drunken withdrawals.

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Tbh, I think with some work Tags could basically be this. Monzo just need to include them in the Spending/Summary (NB: I prefer ‘Breakdown’) tab and I think it would please most people.

True, but by the amount of requests on this forum for some type of custom categories, this would be used by the majority of users.

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Right but Hugo’s concern isn’t whether the feature’s in demand, it’s whether they can build something that’s functional & simple enough to use so that the people who want it aren’t put off using it.

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Fair point, but I was answering your previous suggestion that the majority of users wouldn’t want custom categories.

Since, from looking at the posts in this topic alone, a number of apps seem to have some form of custom category spending analytics and that Tags is already set up. It seems perfectly plausible that Monzo could find a Tag based solution to custom categories by making Tags essentially sub categories.

Tags need remembering and typing out though, and can lead to two categories due to typos etc, so can be a mess for reporting.

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Those limitations can be addressed :slight_smile: it’s still early days for Tags

Starling don’t have a cash category so Monzo are just copying them…

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Typos could be easily spotted by users when they look at the spending breakdowns since there would be different breakdowns for #Broadband and #Braodband, for example (just like users can spot miscategorisation atm)

Good point. Some sort of intelligent predictive tagging might help?

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