anyone tried money manager at lloyds tsb?

Spirit_2

I have categorized all of the spend that was uncategorised and the analysis is very good.

I like this a lot and it adds real value to banking with lloydstsb for me.

On logging in tonight the money manager is not working and I am really disappointed.

This could be a really powerful tool for me in reviewing where we spend - based on what we have seen so far we have agreed to mainly use debit cards and withdraw less cash so that we have better records of what we spend our money on.

Pitlanepiglet

I've had MM on my internet banking for a while but I haven't acessed it. I tried to get in today but got an error message.

Edited to add, just tried it again now and got the error

"1600030 : We're sorry Money Manager is currently unavailable. We apologise for any inconvenience."

Looks like it's been down all day.

loracan1

I wonder if it's been down because we're in a new month - I've found it getting better as the days pass. Doesn't seem to want to categorise the £10 school dinner cheque each week though.

My credit card is on there and a couple of major items I've bought on there this month have been put into the monthly budget...I'm wondering if the paying off is going to be included in my spending analysis too.

Portland_Andy

loracan1 wrote: »

I wonder if it's been down because we're in a new month - I've found it getting better as the days pass. Doesn't seem to want to categorise the £10 school dinner cheque each week though.

My credit card is on there and a couple of major items I've bought on there this month have been put into the monthly budget...I'm wondering if the paying off is going to be included in my spending analysis too.

No its been down for a few days now, just as I was getting the hang of it :cool:

Aloonatic

It's a bit silly if you have a Lloyds credit card that you pay with your Lloyds current account, as it essentially counts expenditure double.

i.e. If you spend £200 on petrol using your credit card, it will add that to your expenditure pie chart as a car/petrol expense, but then if you pay £200 from your current account to your credit card, it will count that too, as a credit card/loan payment, along with everything else that you pay for on you credit card

They need an option for people in this situation to ignore certain items, as these extra payments skew the charts somewhat..

It also doesn't seem to happy about letting you go back in the history and change uncategorised items.

Early days though, but it's just a gimik really, and one that I'm sure you'll have to pay for, or have a premium account for once the bugs have been ironed out by us beta testers.

bexdesigns

Aloonatic I had the same annoying issue, re the credit card payment to lloyds cc.

I called them and complained, first guy seemed totally confused by me saying its treating it like you spent the money twice!
Second guy who was meant to be the specialist seemed to understand in theory. But said (I'm paraphrasing)...
'It is treated like an expense because paying your credit card is not a transfer between 2 lloyds accounts (as a current account to savings account would be). It has to be treated this way. I will raise it as a confusing issue with the money manager tech team.'

I said it's not confusing its flawed! It treats current account to savings as 'internal transfer' and basically ignores them as not being an 'expense'. In my opinion it should do that for my lloyds CC payment too, otherwise every time I spend on my CC it's doubled.
I understand interest and charges for CC are expenses, and paying credit card bill from else where is also an expense.

But you cannot count individual CC transactions and CC payment as an expense.

IF they fix that it will be a great service. I had to manually categorise many items, but it seems to be working without me needing to do that much this month.

The 'do the same for similar' transactions could do with some work, I'm not sure what its logic of similar is.

For the person who mentioned cheque each week, you have to manually categorise cheques, lloyds don't know who you paid it to so they can't categorise them for you. People tend to write cheques to different people for different things, so it wouldn't help.

In terms of re-categorising items, they show up straight away for me and nothing every disappears.

I'm a software dev, so I find some of the bugs and quirks particularly annoying, but hopefully they will work on it in the background and it will improve over time.
(We can hope!)

loracan1

Whilst I still find it awkward to navigate between different months (it involves a bit of back-tracking to get to April for instance) I've found it to have improved.

Back in March it decided to include both purchases and subsequent pay off to the credit card, had made major purchases in both February and March, made my spending analysis look ridiculous. Nearly half of it was 'loans and credit cards'

For April it says payments to credit cards are an internal transfer - it's managed to allocate most of the transactions correctly and no mention of credit card payments in the analysis. I have to say it's quite interesting seeing exactly how much I'm spending on food over a month (for example).

ETA: it's let me categorise a cheque for April but still won't for one of the March ones, just keeps throwing it back out. I wonder if there is a limit to how many you can allocate to a payee in a month?

jcrooks

Quite a few number of bugs need to be ironed out before it is really useable. The main 2 issues are:

1. Internal Transfers between Lloyds accounts (i.e Current Account to Credit Card) are double counted

2. Placing a transaction into a category 50% of the time crashes. Especially if you add a category to multiple transactions.

Raising a bug with Lloyds is pointless, as no one cares, or is interesting in logging any defects.

loracan1

jcrooks wrote: »

1. Internal Transfers between Lloyds accounts (i.e Current Account to Credit Card) are double counted

2. Placing a transaction into a category 50% of the time crashes. Especially if you add a category to multiple transactions.

Transfer to a TSB credit card is only counted as an internal transfer and doesn't show in the transactions in April - though it does for March (this is only in my own experience).

On point 2, I've found it acts differently depending on which browser you're using, can't allocate anything on IE, firefox was great until last Monday (can't log in on there now) and have yet to try opera.

Cmdr_Bond

I've had no problems with it for the few times I have used it. i find the bill manager more buggy TBH.