We've Added Some New Categories

you can already do this on iOS with the search function, by category then date then export
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Silly me for buying Android! :wink: Hope we get feature parity sometime soon.

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Any plans to have more categories / custom categories? Now i’ve gone #fullmonzo really finding the current categories quite limiting.

Would love to understand the technical challenges of doing this and hear reasons why we only have the few categories we do

I think Hugo goes into this in detail in the first post.

and on from there.

There aren’t any plans for custom categories but they’ve not ruled out additional ones.

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Thanks @tomsr - i think i’d actually read the original post but had forgotten about some of the points :man_facepalming:

Totally agree re custom categories, but would be good to see some additional ones at some point.

Especially transfers which I brought up in another post - this would exclude the transactions from ‘spent today’ and ‘summary’

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I don’t think custom categories are a good idea, but I hope more categories and subcategories become a thing. Along with prompts for merchants like wetherspoons where you might get prompted to choose between food or drink.

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Yep. I think I’ve mentioned before a couple I’d like…

  • Gifts
  • Booze (!)
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I think I prefer booze to be in the entertainment category. It sounds so much more refined. :crazy_face:

A food and drink category would be good Loot use this! It kinda covers booze in the evening/weekends, snacks at work etc without being classed as eating out(restaurants) or groceries(food shopping).

The Finances category is intended for these types of transactions already so I guess it makes sense to make those adjustments for that category at some point..

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I for one would love more customisation in categories.

From the blog post:

because you can’t control what you can’t measure.

The next step in achieving that has to be more customisation; and if the budgeting functionality of Monzo wants to be really powerful, then it’s a logical next step too.

To that point (emphasis mine) I’m not interested in how my spending compares to everyone else. I’m interested in how my spending compares to my budget, and the macro trends in my spending from month to month. I don’t see how that sort of data aggregation is useful, to the user themselves. Knowing those kinds of statistics doesn’t help me prioritise, or give me any actionable information against my own budget.

I’m a user of YNAB for my budgeting - and would recommend it if anyone in this thread thinks “I would like more categories”. It allows me to have a the granularity I want in my budget, to measure and control the specific goals and obligations I have. I genuinely think if Monzo adopted some of YNAB’s approach to categorisation (and more broadly, budgeting), it would indeed be a powerful feature that would benefit it’s users more significantly than some of the reasons why Monzo do not wish to add more categorisation.

Not my circus / not my monkeys and all - and I’m happy broadly ignoring the categories in Monzo - but some thoughts non the less.

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This is a common comment. But personally, I wouldn’t dismiss this idea until I’ve seen it working :slight_smile:

YNAB is for power users, it’s far more sophisticated budgeting than most people use.

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I’d certainly like to see it in action for sure, but I would still say that data relative to my own spending history will always be more valuable and relevant. How would you envision using these kinds of analysis in that case?

Absolutely disagree that it’s for power users. It can be as convoluted and complex, or as simple as required by your finances; and it gives a simple plan for spending/saving against your priorities.

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“You’re spending £20 more on average than people [your age] in [Brixton] on [Groceries] each [week], have you thought about doing a weekly shop instead?”

“You could save £X by getting a season pass for your Transport, rather than paying for individual journeys / using Uber + black cabs all the time.”

etc.

It’s not just comparisons with others that custom categories break by the way. If you created a taxi custom category that Monzo isn’t aware of then they can’t give you that second insight, for example.

Lets agree to disagree, it doesn’t look very simple to me!

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That type of analysis only works and becomes useful when everyone is using ‘groceries’ correctly.
For example, when I buy my lunch at work (a sandwich from the local shop) that goes down as groceries because I don’t want it in ‘eating out’ but there’s no ‘work lunch’ category.
So to say I spend more on groceries than the average could be inaccurate depending on how everyone else categorised their work lunch.

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I’m not sure analysis compared to other users would ever work well, partly due to this, but also everyone has different wants/needs/priorities/salaries.

Analysis based on comparisons with your previous self, whether last week/month/year would be more useful I think, and more realistic to implement.

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It doesn’t have to be perfect, as long as enough people use the category for the same thing it works.

I sometimes find it annoying if I go to a restaurant/bar as part of a night out, end up buying a few rounds - these transactions understandably enter the ‘eating out’ category but for me I’d prefer another category for this.

I’d prefer to;
(a) be able to create my own category called ‘nights out’ (or whatever else) and…
(b) be able to select multiple transactions and move them to another category at once instead of having to select them one by one.

Seems like a simple thing to change to save me lots of time and make it a bit more user friendly.

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