Beating Monzo Plus with Python and Pandas

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I started banking with Monzo about two years ago now, and back then I found it fascinating that there was this bank that was completely online — no high street locations in sight. Even now I’m impressed with how far these digital-only banks have come, boasting useful features like savings pots and transaction categorisation.

I’ll be honest, but until recently I wasn’t too fussed by Monzo’s ability to automatically categorise transactions depending on the vendor, but since starting my university life, managing my finances has become vastly more important to me. I decided to take a closer look at this feature, and while it was cool, I was greatly disappointed by the lack of options.

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Don’t get me wrong, Monzo’s selection of categories, is fine, but there was a distinct lack of some important options like ‘Rent’ or ‘Recurring Subscription’ or similar. Of course, these could both realistically come under ‘Bills’, but what about other things a scrounging student has to pay for on the regular, like laundry? There’s certainly no category for that, and ‘Expenses’ could be anything.

Feeling a bit defeated, I settled for creating a spreadsheet and spending an hour or so looking through my transactions once a week, filling out cells and totting up how much I’d spent on different things each month. I ended up configuring my spreadsheet for my three main accounts — my Monzo account, my student bank account and my Help-to-Buy ISA — and setting up some Excel formulae to automatically deduct from one account if I made a transfer to the other, and so on.

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This worked fine for a time, and while I still wasn’t happy that Monzo didn’t offer a similar feature by default, I kept on using the bank anyway.

However, everything changed in July of 2020 when Monzo introduced a new feature to their bank accounts, one that could simultaneously solve my problems and create a new one, and quite a large one at that.

You see, on July 15th 2020, Monzo released Monzo Plus, a new type of account that offered numerous benefits, including virtual cards, more interest and, you guessed it, custom categories.

The problem with Monzo Plus, of course, is that it’s a paid service. It’s not a lot — just £5 a month — but as a broke university undergraduate, paying that was not an option. I refused to stay silent any longer.

In a fit of absolute rage, I rushed to my computer, set up a virtualenv, opened PyCharm and started typing away angrily at my keyboard. Soon after I had a basic program that would go through a CSV of transactions I downloaded from the Monzo app, ask me to categorise them and then, if I so desired, store a map of vendor names to categories so I wouldn’t have to go through every transaction every single time. I then used the openpyxl module to insert the totals for each category into the spreadsheet I was already using.

It was great, and over time I updated it to store the transaction ID of any successfully parsed transaction so that it wouldn’t count the same transaction twice with multiple uses of the software.

Realistically, all the program does is reads the CSV of transaction data into a pandas DataFrame, asks the user which category the transaction falls under, inserts that into the DataFrame and totals everything up. Naturally, there’s a lot of user input checking and fall-back nonsense, but that’s the general gist of it.

# Creates copy slice of main DataFrame to pass to parser
transaction = transaction_df.iloc[i].copy()

# Checks if transaction IDs are being used
if use_transaction_id:
    transaction_id = transaction["Transaction IDs"]

    # Checks that current transaction has not already been processed to avoid incorrect output to final spreadsheet
    if transaction_id in transaction_history:
        pprint("\n{BLUE}Transaction processed previously, skipping...{RESET}")
        continue

# Uses parser to get category
category = parser.parse_category(transaction, categories, currency_symbol)
# Update main DataFrame
transaction_df.loc[i, "Categories"] = category

if use_transaction_id:
    # If transaction was processed successfully, stores it in transaction history
    transaction_history.append(transaction_id)

However, the story doesn’t end there. One day I was speaking to a friend of mine about this who also banks with Monzo, and he mentioned that he would also find such a program useful, but would need it to work with different categories and insert data into different rows of the spreadsheet.

So, I rewrote part of it to pull custom category names and spreadsheet rows from a TXT file, and thought “Well if he would find it useful, maybe someone else would too.”

I ended up uploading the project to GitHub, and have since expanded support to all banks and added some more features to improve the user experience. if you’re interested in checking the project or perhaps using it for yourself, you can find it on GitHub here.

Thanks for reading to the end! If you’ve enjoyed the article or found it useful, please do let me know. Any feedback is greatly appreciated!