Why is Trends so awful?!

UK Monzo Chat
1

This isn’t the first time I’ve stated this but Trends is just so awful and I can’t understand how this has been created so wrongly.

Here’s an example. My budget I have set for this month is £800. I still have about £98 left in my account this month. Trends, says I went over budget by £51, 9 days ago. That is factually incorrect. I have £98 of my budget left.

From what I can tell, it is because things like transfers I.e. someone might pay me money for dinner but then pay it straight out, count towards my budget when that was never money included in my budget.

I already have transfers, bills etc excluded from the target yet it still goes wrong.

Summary never did this. It was simple and it worked.

Is anyone else having issues or managed to actually make this seemingly useless tool work?!

3 Likes
2

If you categorise the transfer in from someone paying you for dinner as say “restaurant or eating out” does it then balance out for that category ?

3

Both the in and out for that transaction are categorised as “transfer” so it should be ignoring both.

Hence why I am convinced it is broken and a load of crap. It’s not reliable at all and it shouldn’t take that much effort to get it right. You should be able to set a target and then it tracks it according to what is left in your current account. It doesn’t do that sadly.

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4

Trends will ignore transfers, you’ll need to check all transactions to correct it.

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Trends is incomprehensible in my humble opinion. If you need to mess about so much to get it to “work”, it’s built wrong.

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It’s not failed me yet so I assume the commenter hasn’t categorised something properly hence the issue they are seeing.

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Every category looks fine. There are no transactions that aren’t things I’ve spent, yet it still say I’m over budget when I have money left.

As I’ve previously said, it’s not a useful tool. It’s inaccurate and not fit for purpose.

With the same data, summary gets it spot on and tells me that I have the exact amount of money left that I have got. How can summary be correct and trends be wrong?

8

Have you edit the spending tab in Trends to align?

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I can’t see that there is anything different on the spending tab?

I’m not even sure what the point in having the two tabs is! They appear identical to me and also both as wrong as each other.

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Trends doesn’t care what your balance is. Categories you’ve ignored can still affect your balance but shouldn’t affect trends at all.

Have you checked which accounts are set to be included in the calculation? Personal and joint account, pots, and any connected accounts can all be added and will impact the calculation as well.

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The only account selected is my personal account. Absolutely nothing else.

12

Have you tried editing the target settings as they may be impacting it? Aka budgets.

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Confused what you mean here? The target is set for £800. It’s set to only include my personal account and is excluding the default things, no other category has any settings.

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It’ll be a user error somewhere, a setting mot correct.

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Which takes me back to my original point.

If it is that complicated and easy to get it wrong, then it’s not a very good tool.

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16

Difficult to assess without being hands on.

May resolve itself over time, is it the date periods incorrect ie working day before kinda thing?

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The summary feature was much better as you could set it to reset every 4 weeks, as you can’t trends is unless to me!

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18

I agree that Trends is awful and needs significant improvement in order to be useful.

For example, I can exclude payments on my credit card from the summary so they don’t impact that month’s budget, but in Trends, they’re included in shopping, which pushes me over my budget total.

Trends isn’t going to help me manage my ‘free’, aka non-allocated money, in the way that Summary allows me to. Therefore, it isn’t fit for purpose.

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19

I certainly don’t think Trends is perfect by any means, however, I don’t think it miscalculates anything from what I’ve seen. I haven’t seen anyone lay this out above but forgive me if I missed it.

You keep mentioning your current account balance. This is irrelevant to your Target tab (i.e. budget… the name is one of my issues lol)

You have set a target of £800. Monzo thinks you’ve spent £851 in your included categories, but you think you’ve only spent £702.

To figure out what’s going wrong all you should need to do is look immediately under the target graph, where you should see “Breakdown” and a list of everything Monzo is including in that £851. Clicking each category will show all the individual transactions - so going into these should allow you to spot which £149 worth of transactions are being included when you don’t want them to be, and thus (hopefully) adjust your settings to exclude them.

I do take your point that it is a bit more complicated to figure out than it ideally should be, and I’m sure there is some decent room for making it clearer from a UI perspective… however, I also think a lot of that complexity is because they allow you to include and exclude stuff, and would be hard to make simpler without reducing user choice. Tbh I think there is some complexity missing still, such as more options for payment dates/different lengths of period to track (e.g. paid weekly) and excluding specific purchases or retailers/payees from target (e.g. like Chris mentioned above).

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I understand how it should work, but that’s where I believe it isn’t.

I have (had) £800. It is set to take into account my personal account. That’s it. Nothing else. Just that account where I am spending that £800. How has that simple maths, gone wrong?! It isn’t including any other transaction from anywhere and that’s what frustrates me

I don’t need it nor have I set it to be complicated. Yet it fails.