And not only people with a dog but a roof over the top of them to symbolise Household, which is another category missing.
1 Like
One further thing Monzo will need to handle in the long term is categories for business accounts, which will be very different from those appropriate for personal accounts. Do you have plans for business categories?
1 Like
Business accounts aren’t even on the road map for now so I doubt they have even considered thinking about it
We will have to agree to disagree then - for instance I think Starling’s development rate is way higher than Monzo’s.
3 Likes
I think they are planning them (starting with sole traders and single owner businesses).
3 Likes
Nice, I thought that may have been to discuss how Summary would work for them without a guaranteed income/ income date. Nice to know it’s potentially in the works.
Similarly, could you look at broadening the transport icon? 
I don’t disagree with your idea to pre-set notes/tags on direct debits (and standing orders), I think that would be great. 
But on the topic of tracking charity donations for tax returns specifically, you have to separate one-off (ad-hoc) and regular donations anyway. So you could continue tagging your ad-hoc donations and not bother with the direct debits. Then when filing taxes, you can easily get the total of ad-hocs by tapping on the tag, and you can use the direct debit screen to quickly find out the totals of your regular giving as well.
2 Likes
Interesting - I didn’t know this. There’s no mention of it on GOV.UK - what’s the practical difference between donating 12 ‘one off’ amounts and a regular donation? And more importantly, how is the tax treatment different?
I don’t know, I just know that when I do the self assessment form on the HMRC website, it asks for the total of one off donations separately from regular giving. 
2 Likes
I’ll look out for that next time. I’m no expert, but I suspect the underlying gift-aid treatment will be the same and HMRC are “trying to make it easy” by giving you one of those workbook things to calculate stuff.
(Random thought: self-assessment online is rubbish, but HMRC have a whole host of APIs. Could someone connect Monzo and HMRC to do returns automagically? Possibly too niche for Monzo themselves?)
2 Likes
I use transport for planes and trains too…so maybe an icon with a plane, train and automobile?
I’ve found the new categories really handy! 
I think it would also be handy if you could categorise and see a summary of income- for example I receive a student stipend and also do various teaching jobs etc. It would help me to see how much my income each month is on average (I am sure a lot of other people’s income is also variable), and to see my total income from each source.
… I also think it would be handy to have a tobacco and alcohol (better labelled) category as I am sure a lot of people (including me) would benefit from seeing how much I spend on such things each month. This type of outgoing is often viewed as fixed and separate from other entertainment outgoings. I appreciate this wouldn’t be relevant to a lot of people (would be interesting to know how many people would find this useful!..)- I currently categorise it under entertainment and use hashtags.
3 Likes
Great work!
I can’t be alone in wanting to add my own spending categories.
Say I go for a few beers with some friends, the closest I can label that is as eating out, when in truth I need a separate category for eating out. Getting a coffee on the way to work is not the same as eating out either, but neither is it the same as groceries or fast food.
All I think we need is a basic option to create and label our own categories.
This is a bank for the people, so let’s make it more personal!
3 Likes
Hey Nathan 
You’re definitely not the only one who’s looked for the option to add their own categories 
In your case, it sounds like Tags could be your solution, I use them to group exactly the same types of transactions!
If not, Hugo’s explained in the first thread of this post what challenges custom categories would cause so please take a look at the replies & if you have any ideas for solving those challenges, please do share them 
2 Likes
Only a month late to the conversation 
, but the ‘new’ YNAB does allow you to do everything in the app, they give you suggested categories but then you are free to go mad.
Budgeting is a complex thing, everyone’s needs are different. For example, my job come with my house, so I don’t have a rent or mortgage line. If the aim really is to help people manage their money the YNAB route (and I think they have this spot on) is to give an ace set of standard categories which may well work for 50% of their users and then allow the people who want different layers of granularity to go wild 
.
I thought I had a pretty reduced list of categories in my budget, but it turns out I have 50! In a Monzo universe many of those would be pots (we save every month towards our car insurance, our emergency fund etc.), but we do budget for the guinea pigs separate from the children’s activities, so one category for those would be a challenge for us!!
But this is an iterative process, as you say, so this is my (late) contribution!
2 Likes
I’m in my third month, and I’ve got well over 50 categories :-/
Can confirm you can manage categories on mobile.
It would be great if you could export a list of transactions by category. For example, I use ‘expenses’ for when I travel and want to claim back from my company. Trouble is they don’t want to look (and I don’t want them looking) at all my other personal transactions.
How’s about a way of exporting particular categories into a report that we can hand over to payroll for processing! 