With smart rules (the name for the automation feature) you choose the api-connected account you want to monitor and provide characteristics of transactions you want to detect in that account (like a specific bank transfer reference, a specific value range, etc). You then nominate the manual (offline) account you want to link the detected transactions to. So if you have set it to monitor for transactions from your current account with the reference “To Zopa” (for example) it will deposit that amount into your manual Zopa account and will will see a list of the smart-rule-applied transactions in that account.
It works well with most accounts, but unfortunately not with Monzo or Starling. The issue is Emma does not pull in bank transfer references from Monzo or Starling making it impossible to define precise rules. The issue was acknowledged over two years ago, but it doesn’t seem a high priority issue as it hasn’t been fixed.
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Re goals…
You can assign single savings goals to single savings accounts. But I don’t think you can assign multiple goals to a single savings account. Also, I don’t think you can map multiple accounts to a single goal.
You can create manual (offline) loan accounts. The full list for manual account type options is: current account, credit card, savings account, loan, investment account, pension. Loans and Pension accounts appear within the Net Worth section of the account widget.
For certain api-connected-accounts you can change account type - for example you can change a current account to a savings account and this will influence where it resides within the accounts widget.
However, you don’t seem to be able to change the type for api-connected-credit-card accounts. Perhaps this is an oversight as it would definitely be helpful to be able to change to Loan type.
Whilst you can influence where accounts appear within the accounts widget (by changing their type), something you can’t do is influence the overall appearance of the widget. At the top level, the widget is organised into Everyday, Savings, Investments, Net Worth. I’d like to be able to change this to Current, Credit, Savings, and Net Worth. Unfortunately, this type of configuration isn’t possible.
If the smart rules feature worked for Monzo, and also worked in reverse (i.e. saw how much I’m paying off on my 0% card every month and took that off the outstanding balance) then that would be amazing!
Having read the topic in a bit more detail, I think the summary of things that are missing for me is then:
Import data from CSV/QIF files
Subcategories (especially for income)
Ability to exclude categories/subcategories from analytics
Smart rules to work from Monzo
Smart rules to work for loans / negative balances
Recategorise individual credit cards as loans / everyday spending etc
Customise the overview widget (Everyday/Savings/Investments/Net Worth)
Automatic export to Google Sheets
Aggregate all savings accounts to one value then allocate goals from that value
Specific account type of ‘mortgage’ in manual accounts
Manual investment accounts where you enter how many shares you own and Emma updates the value to the live share price
Property price APIs to get live property values
More sophisticated periods (e.g. start a new period automatically when my salary is detected), or otherwise things like ‘last working day minus one’ (I need this because Monzo get paid early messes things up).
Manually set up future transactions to help budgeting (e.g. I know I’m going to spend £100 on something in two weeks time - I add it so it comes out of my budget, then it falls off when the real transaction happens).
My experience is Emma does a good job auto-resetting pay periods. My pay normally arrives around 26th of the month (so my typical budget/analytics period is 26th to 25th of following month) but sometimes will arrive earlier. If I receive my pay on the 24th Emma will automatically adjust the period to 24th (current month) to 25th (following month) without any intervention from me. So I imagine it would easily adapt to use of Monzo get paid early feature.
Hey @edoardomoreni - I see that “Tax Returns” are on the open roadmap (excellent work on publishing that btw - loving what I’m seeing, especially CSV import):
If you can have Emma do my self assessment tax return for me then you’ll have one very happy customer! (Especially if it can deal with crowdfunding losses, profit and EIS!!).
There has been loads of great suggestions on this channel now. Do we have a sort of list or updated roadmap that includes some of the missing features noted here so we can get an idea of if/when we could look forward to whats coming next with EMMA
Hey Peter! That is a really great list you have compiled and we really appreciate such detailed feedback to help us make the app better!! We’re going to evaluate how we can implement these suggestions and in the meantime keep them coming we love customer input to make Emma the best it can be!
Hey Dennis! In the app you are able to adjust the dates for your budgeting period and can select variable monthly date to set it according to your pay schedule. Hope that helps!
Hi, I would love for offline accounts to allow for an import, I love my apple card and can get each monthly statement as a .csv, and would love to import those transactions easily. I know it’s on plaid and apple to get this done via API so I think this would be a useful workaround.
This is something we have looked at and might happen. I have recently seen a competitor allowing CSV imports from another competitor app (Mint).
It shouldn’t be that difficult in theory, if all the columns are matching our format, but still requires some work of reconciliations with the active bank login if there is any.
The fraud detection widget on the feed indicates the date of the last scan and the number of breaches. I think it would be more useful for the widget to indicate the date of the last breach.
To add to this - in addition to being able to change credit accounts to other types, I think it would also be helpful to be able to change other account types to credit accounts.
The reason I say this is I use a savings pot as a temporary place to hold money which will ultimately be used to pay credit card bills. From a budgeting perspective, I’d find it very useful to see that savings pot in the credit card account list in Emma so it offsets the combined credit card balance.
Bit late to the thread but just wanted to +1 for forecasting! Hopefully this means being able to see 12 months into future and tell Emma predictions on things like wage income for future months etc… then I can finally ditch my excel.
Will the web version include the cashback feature?
At moment I don’t look at Emma cashback at all because I prefer to do my online shopping from my PC rather than my phone (so only really tend to check cashback providers that have a website). But if the web version has the cashback feature I’d probably more inclined to use/try Emma cashback.
