'You've spent £xx today' messages

Hey!

One of my fave features of the prepaid Monzo card was the way the notifications would come up with something like:

You spent 5.60 at Pret :sandwich::sandwich:. You’ve spent 17.10 today.

That last bit - showing me how much I spent today - was really useful and probably the single most effective thing I’ve ever had to help me be aware of how much I’ve spent, keep a lid on the small purchases that gradually steal all my money, and stick to my daily budget.

It’s not there in the current account app. The notifications are bigger and appear at the top of the notification area, and they don’t tell me how much I’ve spent in the day. I can see that if I click on the app. But I don’t see it automatically which means it doesn’t have the positive effect on my spending behaviours that I’m looking for.

Can you bring this back in a future release please? It’s one of my favourite things about Monzo!

Thanks.

(I’m using the Android app, BTW)

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How did I miss that this wasn’t happening :joy:. I guess I just forgot but I 2nd this idea/bug

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What should be done about the impact of direct debits and standing orders on this function?

I can see that for those with mortgages etc a message stating “You spent £1.22 at Costa, you’ve spent £1,277.53 today” wouldn’t be helpful.

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Yep, v.true. That’s a ‘growing pain’ issue that Monzo will have to deal with as people start to use it as a general bank account rather than just for ‘pocket money’ purchases. Similar to some of the discussion in this thread about the fact that a salary payment is pretty different from £3 on a sandwich, and needs to be treated differently. I guess they’ll need some kind of algorithm to sort payments and make sure they do something sensible. I guess the easiest starting point would be to count card payments only, and ignore DDs and salary payments when giving those daily totals.

But for the moment I only use Monzo Current Account for everyday spending - my bills etc go through my other accounts. So these alerts would work really well for me.

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I’m sure they could put in a threshold above which you don’t receive an amount for that day I.e. If rent had gone out… or expenditure above the threshold is not included in that daily sum and they could just put an asterisk to denote that there were other outgoings…

You have spent a total of £27.83* today

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I suspect you’d really want to exclude those from daily (though maybe have them show up in a “monthly spending” report).

On a side note, can you actually get anything in Costa for £1.22?

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I would be very happy with this coming back.
Found it very useful so far helping with keep track of spending without having to open the app.

Packet of crisps?

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Being able to exclude some payments from this total spend would be great once the CA has these notifications, things like mortgage payments, insurance for car, home etc aren’t daily so don’t help on the spending tally for the day. Giving us the option to include/exclude any payment in or out would be great.

Another idea for example is when I pay for a meal and someone sends me money for their half, that payment should have an option to be deducted from todays “eating out” spend?

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I’ve had similar thoughts. The ‘Spent today’ figure on the transactions screen is often scary / not particularly useful around payday when a large proportion of my money is transferred out to joint account / savings etc. I’d agree that this needs a bit more thought!

Many thanks for this feedback, it really helps!

We’ll soon give you a simple way to decide which of your transactions you don’t want to be included on the spending calculations. Once that’s ready we’ll bring the notifications back :slight_smile:

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Will this include both incoming and outgoing transactions? for example allow you to deduct an incoming payment from total spend in a category? for instance when a friend pays you for paying for dinner?

Yes, that’s exactly how it’ll work. We think it’ll fix most of the problems we currently have:

  • Refunds that don’t make your spending go smaller.
  • Sending money to yourself (into a different bank account) counting as spending.
  • A friend sends you some money as a present, so you don’t want it to be considered spending.
  • A friend sends you some money as a way of paying back for something, so you want it to be counted as “less” spending on that category.

It’s a bit weird to explain but at the end of the day it’s just one switch to say “Included/Not included” in the category picker. Bear with us :slight_smile:

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Thanks! I might go back to using the prepaid card for a bit until this one is sorted. Without the ‘daily spend’ tracking as a push notification, I lose track of spending worryingly easily!

The daily spend graph in Starling is handy for that

Hey - is this in the current account roadmap? Any idea yet when it will be added?

I’m back on prepay for the moment until it’s sorted!

Given that the current account app is going away pretty soon and we’ll all be back on the Monzo app which already supports this, my guess would be that we’ll get it at that point.

Is that the way they’ll do it, though? I’d assumed they’d develop the Current Account app until the point where it had the same functionality as the Monzo Pre-pay app (or until they were ready to switch everyone over to current accounts), and then make the Current Account app the default app.

When they switch everyone over to CAs, the app everyone uses will need to have functionality for Faster Payments, DDs, standing orders etc. So I don’t think they could just move all the CA holders back to the old Monzo app because it’s missing lots of features that are necessary to use the CA properly. The new ‘master’ app will need to be a hybrid of the current Monzo Pre-pay app and the current CA app. My guess was that they’d develop the CA app until it was at that point. So I don’t think we can necessarily assume that every feature in the Monzo Pre-pay app will be replicated in the eventual CA app. I just really hope they keep this one!

No, they’ve already said the Monzo app update will be out next week (for iOS) and an in-app notification will prompt people to migrate to a full Current Account. They’ve been pretty clear about it.

The TestFlight app was only ever a placeholder to get the Current Account itself tested, not a mechanism for testing or developing app features. That’s why DDs were hurridly implemented in the way they were and then left alone - it was a ‘just enough solution’ to make them useable while the actual development effort went into the ‘proper’ implementation in the ‘proper’ app.

The dedicated CA app has done it’s job now

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So - I’ve now upgraded to the ‘full’ current account experience, on the old app.

THIS FEATURE HAS GONE! :cry:

I just get ‘£2 Tesco’, not ‘£2 Tesco - you’ve spent £17.10 today.’

Please, Monzo, can you re-introduce this as an option? It’s the only thing that has ever let me keep track of my spending accurately and stopped from spending money unthinkingly! It is the magic of Monzo!

As @Hugo said above, there’s some work to be done and then they’ll bring them back.

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