To exclude from budgeting/analytics you mark transactions as excluded. You don’t choose whole categories to exclude. I would describe Emma’s approach to budgeting/analytics as being more like Monzo Summary (albeit spanning multiple accounts) than Monzo Trends.
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Thanks!
I suppose I’m thinking about my finances as a bunch of mega categories: spending, saving, investment and transfers/ignored/excluded.
I’d quite like to see all of these tracked in some way. But maybe it’s just the way my brain’s been programmed by other solutions.
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Personally I think about investing as spending on my future self. So I’m quite happy to treat money I pay into investment accounts as a sub-category of spending.
But I flip back and forth on approaches to categorising money I deposit into short term savings (such as regular deposits I make into savings accounts I have for covering annual expenses). At times I’ve categorised these deposits as spends (by assigning them a custom annual expenses category). Then when I eventually come to pay the annual expense/s from funds in the savings accounts I marked the transfers out of the savings accounts and payments to the merchants as excluded (as already assigned as spends when depositing into the savings accounts in the first place). Leads to consistent monthly spends in my tracking, but I lose granularity as the payments to merchants aren’t categorised. I’ve now switched to categorising the initial deposits into the savings accounts as excluded and categorising the later payments as spends. I regain the granularity (particularly useful when viewed over an annual period), although does also lead to some months with unusually high spends.
Thinking about this, I suppose it would be useful if I could track more than one excluded category (like Monzo Trends) as I could then monitor how much money I’m putting away in my short term savings without treating these as spends.
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What is the likelihood/practicality of an iPhone Widget?
Ideally configurable for selected accounts with:
balance/true balance
Daily spend tracking
Recent Transactions
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Personally I’d love to see the option to exclude whole categories from my overall budget and spending.
I use budgets and spending to track my everyday personal spend. So take holidays for instance, I save money specifically for holidays and I don’t want money I spend on holidays to factor into my every day budgets and spending as if it did it would throw my tracking of regular spending month to month way off.
Currently I categorise all spending on holidays as excluded which works, but doesn’t actually allow me to really see how much I did actually spend on holiday as it’s all jumbled up with transactions that should be excluded for other reasons.
Realise that not everyone or even most people would work this way but it seems like a simple feature that would be useful for quite a few people.
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This is in our roadmap. 
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Amazing, look forward to seeing it in the app when it’s ready.
This is something we have thought of in the past! What information exactly would you want to see included in the widget?
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Hi,
I agree with everything you have included in your list.
I use Emma for 90% of my finances now however I still use spreadsheets for mainly forecasting ( I know this is included in your list but thought I’d be more specific). For example would it be possible to have a tab where you can forecast your budget for the year for each month, as I use this to forecast how much I am able save and gives me a more overall insight to what I need to cut back on to meet my goals for the year rather than just take each month in turn. Then maybe you can adjust the monthly budget as and when you need to (or compare to 12 months initial budget)
Hope this makes sense.
I would second this feature. I put money aside at the start of each month for stuff I know I’ll have to spend or want to smooth out payments for eg; Fuel, Groceries, Holidays, Car Maintenance, Home Maintenance, Bills etc. What is left in one of my current accounts is my “fun” money for the month. If I spend in one of those categories I just shift the money back to the current account. Emma has really helped with this as, after some admin work categorising the last 12 months spending I know exactly what my monthly averages are thanks to the analytics.
For me a really simple budget of [Specified Account Balance] / [Days to Payday] = Daily Budget
If my daily budget is dropping I’m spending too fast, if it’s going up I’m saving. It’s a very helpful metric.
Oh cool!
For me the 2 things I would want in a widget are balance of a specific account and daily allowance figure. Possibly a graphic of whether daily allowance is trending down or up?
But I can see people wanting to be able to select a bunch of stuff depending on how they manage their finances.
If you’re looking at widgets have you also considered outputs to shortcuts?
The way we wanted to do this is for us to forecast the next period. This would be super simple and intuitive (one number max).
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Would you be able to set up specific savings categories (maybe as like a type) I like to allocate a set amount to savings so I’ve created custom categories i.e emergency fund. However when I view my analytics and see income vs expenses it is included as an expense not savings. Could you implement savings categories or suggest a way I can account for savings please?
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Hey Luke!
This is an interesting suggestion and one I think other user’s would benefit from as well! We’ll take a look into how we could build this capacity into the app!
Thank you!
We are planning to allow customers to exclude categories from analytics - this should solve your case.
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Hi, +1 for bulk editing. I’ve just signed up for ultimate and really like the app but it’s such a pain to have to back out of categories in the analytics view, to change the category on multiple items at the same time within All Transactions. Any news on whether/when bulk edit might be available from within analytics or within search results? Thanks
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I really don’t have the time to read 297 posts to see if someone has already suggested any of these, so I apologise:
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Shouldn’t recurring payments be recurring transactions, then add the ability to setup recurring income as well as payments.
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The ability to add transactions to offline accounts that are not triggered by an online account. E.g. depreciation of an asset or a pension contribution.
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Emma fails to remember renamed regular transactions between online accounts. Have to rename the same account transactions literally every day.
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More control is needed over the way you group accounts. I don’t want credit card lumped in with Everyday, it doesn’t give a clear picture of a balance.
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We have this in the app?
Yes, we don’t have the learning technology for transactions renames - we decided this so that we don’t make serious mistakes (as in you don’t recognise your transactions anymore).