This is going to be a very niche complaint. Please feel free to skip.

I currently use Monzo for budgeting. Nothing else works quite as well. Nothing else works quite as well because Monzo, and only Monzo, deals with a ridiculously common budgeting scenario in a sensible way - i.e. sometimes I buy something on my card, and someone else pays for part of it, and then I want to actually see my remaining budget.

On Monzo, this works as follows:

  • I have a budget of £100.
  • I buy £10 of stuff.
  • My partner sends me £5.
  • I categorise the debit of £10 and the credit of £5 under the same spending category.
  • My remaining budget is now £95, because Monzo sees that I’ve spent a net £5.

This is a sensible, rational way of doing things. You can assign credits to categories/budgeted spend and it reduces the amount of spend accounted for on the budget.

Here is how it works on the three other big fintech banks I’ve tried (Revolut, Starling and Chase):

  • I have a budget of £100.
  • I buy £10 of stuff.
  • My partner sends me £5.
  • Either I can’t categorise credits under spending categories, or credits don’t net off against debits in the budget.
  • My remaining budget is now £90 (net £10 difference) because the budgeting system only counts the £10 spend.

This is stupid. It helps literally nobody. Least of all me, because whereas with Monzo I can just tap “Trends” and see how much money I actually have left in my budget, on the others I just… well basically I just get to go fuck myself and figure out my remaining budget myself, which begs the question of why I’d use a fancy fintech app that is supposed to help me budget if I then have to budget myself anyway.

Revolut, at least, lets you manually amend the amount that you can account for in analytics. But that is far more fiddly. And you have to do it on the credit as well, otherwise it shows on the “income” tile in their Analytics section, which also then makes no sense if you include something that isn’t actually income (i.e. someone else paying you for something.) Categorising in Monzo, however, takes literally two taps.

I’m sure that these systems are great if you are a single person who never has to share expenses with anyone. Maybe Starling’s target market is people without partners or friends. Who knows. What I do know is that Starling actually worked right for a while and then decided to change it, for reasons I can’t fathom but can only assume are mainly just spite towards me personally.

Either way, I’d like them to fix it, because quite frankly paying Monzo £3 a month to get the only vaguely sensible budgeting system and custom categories really rankles.