True balance after bills šŸ’°

Hola!

Weā€™re adding a new feature to Emma thatā€™ll forecast what your current account balance is after all your bills go out :muscle:

Atm we imagine that itā€™ll be shown when you click into the current account :blush:

What do you guys think about this? Reckon itā€™ll help identify how much money you actually have to spend each month?

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A must have!!! :+1:

Are you going to show the next 30 days worth of bills? Or till the end of the month? Till next pay check?

Also: It would be nice to see the rolling total by transaction. At what point I will go beyond my minimum balance threshold on this account.

Awesome! Yeah, it will either be until the end of the month or until the next paycheck - whichever one you have set up!

Thatā€™s an interesting idea. How would you want that displayed?

Oh. You got me excited at first. Now I am not so sureā€¦

I am a monthly budgeter. Why would I want to know what my account balance is at the end of the month?

What would you like to show?

I also find upcoming transactions a little misleading here. I have 30+ subscriptions. There are multiple upcoming payments on that date: Apr 30th. But only one is displayed. Ideally I would love to drag this screen down and upcoming transactions would slide in from beneath the orange. Like a single list with current position in the middle and the ability to scroll up (future) or down (past). Orā€¦ an item called upcoming payments in this list. And if I tap it - it would explode adding upcoming transactions to the list. And then I could collapse it back. Orā€¦ If all of this is too hard. I would at least display the biggest transaction if there are multiple on the same day. In my example I have two upcoming payments: $41 and $1,400. :slight_smile: Both on April 30th. If I can only see one - I care more about $1,400

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Yes,

I think this is another feature, which is totally cool and we can open a ticket about it.

Why do you find this useful? I have it on Barclays and I barely check it - I think the majority of high street banks have it.

The way Iā€™d build it is by updating the balance at the top as you scroll with the correct date underneath.

Yes. This is a different feature. I thought it is the same requirement.

Why do you want true balance after bills? Probably because you want to make sure there is enough money in checking to pay the bills. You want to maintain your account minimum balance. For credit cards ā€“ it is another way to watch your spending. If your balance is too high ā€“ stop spoiling yourself.

These are the reasons to see the rolling total. Thoughā€¦ It is only useful if you include paychecks in the upcoming.

In addition ā€“ I find it weird that upcoming payments stop at the end of the month. I budget monthly. But my payments donā€™t stop with the period end. It is good to see 2-3 weeks of forecast. No matter what todayā€™s date is.

Sorry. I know these are all different features. I am thinking more about the ā€œwhy?ā€ I would want the feature. Not how it is implemented.

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I dunno if weā€™re getting confused here haha - the idea is that weā€™d scan for all your bills in that month/ or in that payday bracket and then tell you at the start of the month/ payday what your new balance is - so you basically had a total balance, and an available to spend balance.

How people use the feature will ofc depend on how they manage their money, but Iā€™d then take the available to spend balance and move that money into my Monzo/ Starling accounts - leaving the rest of the money alone to pay my bills

I wouldnā€™t move it to savings. You may be in the green on April 30th. But you could have your mortgage payment coming up on May 1st. And your next pay is not until May 10th.

Monthly budgeting is different from payday to payday. Month end is not important for cash forecasting.

I guess if you are looking at a small tweak without a whole lot of redesignā€¦ And you want to take advantage of subscriptions. Which is useful data for cash flow forecasting. If I had to pick a single value for account balance to display in the orange in addition to current account balance. Iā€™d pick the lowest forecasted balance in the next 14 days. This would be the most significant number to know from my perspective for the above-mentioned reasons. Not tied to any specific date like month end or last day before paycheck (I could have other planned transfers into the account). Just the lowest number in the nearest future.

I guess if I donā€™t know my account balance after every transaction ā€“ it is not the end of the world. All I really care about is: I have enough money on the account. If my current and my lowest are displayed next to each other - I can easily see how much I will be spending. That will drive my decision to transfer into savings.

Nowā€¦ it is informational. But it creates a negative picture. Account balance going down. I would probably have to offset it with a positive: show the lowest 2-week in the bottom right corner; show the highest 2-week account balance in the top right corner (calculated based on subscriptions and paychecks). Along with the dates for each.

I like that too. If you can build it intuitively.

I actually love this. Since im usually left trying to figure out if i can still afford to buy something after all my bills :sob::sob: lol.

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Oh yay! Weā€™re hoping it just makes budgeting/ knowing how much you can spend 100x easier!

Think this would be really helpful as well, especially if you could choose the budget range, by stating regular pay day and budget then shows balance after bills before next one, and frequency for those paid weekly or 4 weekly. Myself I get paid on last working day, length changes all the time and Christmas is different again. I also worked at a company where I got paid on 25th each month so option like that with the forecasting would be good, so custom to the user

Yeah, itā€™ll be the same kind of process as when you set your budgeting period, where you choose payday to payday or monthly :raised_hands:

Hey guys,

we have also designed and drafted True Balance, which is ready to go next month. :rocket:

3 Likes

So excited for this

Superb! Awesome

1 Like

Still interested to see weekly pay added as an option