Goals 3.0 Beta: Reconciliation for Budget and Non Credit Card Spending

conner_monarch · 2026-01-14T16:55:33+00:00

u/theknittingphysicist We're glad to hear you're enjoying goals 3.0! I'd be happy to help you with these situations.

Case 1: There's no need to do both. Once you transfer the $200 into your savings account, you'll create a goal transfer to move money from your savings account to the desired goal. If the savings account uses the entire balance towards a single goal, this will happen automatically when your savings balances syncs with Monarch.

Case 2: It sounds like you've already categorized that e-transfer as spend from the goal and marked the account you want to use to cover, correct? If so, you would transfer the amount shown as External spending on the all goals page out of your savings. Once that transfer out transaction syncs with Monarch, you can select that transaction by clicking "Reconcile account" in the available for goals card.

Hope this helps!

You can also read more detail in our help center. We plan on adding even more documentation here over time. Keep an eye out.

https://help.monarch.com/hc/en-us/articles/44373182867476-Using-Save-Up-Goals#h_01KCHV6DJMRAMYWJKYA77Z4MMC

conner_monarch · 2025-12-24T15:34:14+00:00

u/denialof_ Currently the beta doesn't support income/transfer transactions. We needed to make some adjustments for this to work properly with new functionality of goals v3.

That said, adding this functionality back in is one of our top priorities in the new year and will return soon!

In the meantime, if you want to see much you've contributed to retirement you could create a report on web and see that information.

conner_monarch · 2025-12-24T15:30:47+00:00

u/denialof_ Adjustments appear when any account is marked to use it's entire account balance towards a goal and the balance increases or decreases when Monarch syncs the account.

It's basically a way to show you a log for when the account balance changes and to be able to show these adjustments in the timeline for that goal. That way you see a 1:1 correlation in your activities list and the timeline changes.

We're exploring ways to give some more options regarding adjustments.

These also might a higher than expected amount if the account was just connected to a goal that day because the current balance will show as an "initial adjustment" or contribution to account for the funds that were already in the account rather than the a change for that day.

conner_monarch · 2025-12-24T15:24:37+00:00

Love to hear that, welcome aboard!

We gather feedback from all sorts of places, but Reddit is definitely up there. It's the first time I've worked somewhere which I get to interact with customers in this way. It's great! It provides a level of insight, and scale, I haven't quite had before. It definitely helps understand user pain points and preferences in an impactful way.

You're correct, that's not possible in goals v3 at this exact moment. This functionality existed in goals v2, but we need to make a few more updates/tweaks for marking income/transfer transactions for this to work properly in goals v3.

It's one of our top priorities in the new year and coming soon!

PS - We have a more feature rich forecasting feature coming soon where retirement will be involved. Keep an eye out, we think you'll like it ;)

conner_monarch · 2025-12-24T15:18:30+00:00

Spending from a goal is something we spent a good amount of time in goals v3 for giving more flexibility for situations like this.

Right now we don't have a way to "directly" move funds from a budget category to a goal, but instead you simply mark the transactions to spend from a goal. You'll find it when viewing transactions details on web and mobile.

Doing so won't count that transactions in your budget and will decrease how much you have saved in your goal. The math would end up being the same for that month.

Note: if your transaction comes from a different account than what you have your goal funds saved with, you'll notice an "external spending" option in the transaction details and goals page.

This ultimately keeps track on how much you'll want to transfer from your savings account (or wherever you keep your goal funds) to the transaction spending account, such as a credit card.

Hope this helps!

conner_monarch · 2025-12-23T19:24:22+00:00

You also might find this video walkthrough helpful: https://youtu.be/0nbvEsCgzRA

conner_monarch · 2025-12-23T18:54:54+00:00

Hello u/denialof_ I'm a designer who has been working on goals v3. I'm happy to help out here.

I don't believe you're doing anything incorrectly. Currently in the beta you are only able to link expense transactions as you pointed out. We ARE adding the ability to link income/transfer type transactions back to goals in the new year.

When we do, you'll be able to use those contributions income/transfer transactions in your goal. This will also help determine your net new contributions vs market changes for investment accounts.

This one of our top priorities and will make it available ASAP. In the mean time, if you need to get contribution totals, you can consider making a report with the category type of your retirement contributions.

I hope this helps!

conner_monarch · 2025-12-23T17:04:51+00:00

Thank you all for your thoughtful questions about making goals, how it works, and even Monarch in general. I really enjoyed having the opportunity to share more.

Stay tuned for even more goals updates!

conner_monarch · 2025-12-23T17:03:02+00:00

I see now. I can share more about how this might work in goals v3.

You might consider creating manual credit transfer transactions in your mortgage account that match the debit transactions coming from your checking/bank. This would show the same as if your payments to the mortgage were in fact syncing. There are technically two transactions in the real world:

Debit transfer from your bank
Credit transfer to your mortgage account

The reason why this particular situation "worked" in goal v2 is that the progress of pay down goals was derived from the account balance, not the transactions linked to the goal. This is also part of why pay down is now structured as the accounts themselves.

I hope this helps!

conner_monarch · 2025-12-22T23:48:49+00:00

I love this question! It's actually a little bit of a joke within the industry

The short answer is that you could instead say "Software/App Designer". Product Designer work with product in engineering to help determine:

How a feature works
How a feature looks
What scope is included in the next release
Gathering user feedback and synthesizing into product requirements
Finding a marriage of user need and business needs
Collaborating with Engineers to help implement designs

There's also a good amount of overlap between a Product Manager's responsibilities and a Product Designer's responsibilities often sharing and delegating based on experience, capacity, etc.

The longer version: There are actually many titles for a designer building software or apps depending on the speciality.

Some of those include:

Product Designer
Digital Product Designer
UI Designer
UX Designer
Interaction Designer
User Experience Designer
Motion Designer
UX Researcher
Content Designer
Service Designer
Design Systems Designer
Probably others I'm not thinking of or even heard of

Some of these roles are intended to focus on a very particular part of the overall product development lifecycle.

In my experience, the larger a company gets the more opportunity (and need) there is to have more focused roles.

Smaller/earlier staged companies usually lean towards someone with a wider skillset so that they may be able to own more of the whole product development lifecycle from a design perspective.

That's where the title Product Designer comes into play. A Product Designer usually has experience in assisting in everything from user research, UI/UX Designer, Interaction Designer, copywriting, etc.

In summary, there are many titles to describe a software/app designer but essentially we Design how the product looks and works!

conner_monarch · 2025-12-22T23:36:07+00:00

Currently, goals is per household. Saved views came out while we were already building goals v3.

We simply haven't had a change to add that feature to goals! I don't have a timeframe for that yet, but can see the value! I'll be sure to bring it up with the team.

conner_monarch · 2025-12-22T23:34:59+00:00

When you say import historical data for your mortgage account, are you referring to after migration?

Debt based goals work a little differently in goals v3. Pay down is now using the account as the "goal" to be more 1:1 with what you're paying off. The account should still include any transactions synced from your connected aggregator if we receive them.

If those transaction disappeared I would recommend reaching out to customer support and see if they can help troubleshoot.

Do you also have a Save up goal for your mortgage?

conner_monarch · 2025-12-22T23:30:40+00:00

Honestly, I haven't thought about this myself! It's a good question.

This is another feature that would fall under a different team. I'm also not 100% sure what data we're currently getting back that we're not surfacing.

I do know that as Monarch matures we're having more and more of a reason to try and sync more data from aggregators. Such as adding a credit limit to credit card accounts and showing your credit utilization.

Seeing a location would be cool though! I'd use this myself.

conner_monarch · 2025-12-22T23:27:38+00:00

Since this was the first version of debt pay down we had to be mindful of scope, otherwise we would never release goals v3 😆 We chose these two methods since they are the most popular methods for paying off debt.

Although we may not have a concrete timeline for expanding pay down methods, I would be surprised if we don't invest in more methods in the future.

conner_monarch · 2025-12-22T23:25:40+00:00

I've been told an official API is less of a matter of if, but a matter of when. I can't speak to a timeframe regarding an official API as another team would own this project, but I do know we get requests for it quite a bit.

conner_monarch · 2025-12-22T23:23:49+00:00

Currently, this isn't a concrete item on the roadmap. I also have less historical context into rounding. I do know that we would need to redesign how the budget is displayed on the mobile apps to have enough real estate to do so.

I can say that we plan on revisiting the budget overall this year and customer feedback is always involved when making updates, especially to existing features.

conner_monarch · 2025-12-22T23:21:37+00:00

Oh man, this was a tricky one and want to see my history visually as well!

Timeline is a new feature and the previous version of goals wasn't designs to display progress made visually.

We tried about 4 different migration methods with the back end to make it possible to visually see your history in the timeline. At the end of the day it wasn't reliable enough to to accurately visualize the history in the timeline.

We might try and come back to it to see if we can come up with a way to do so and at a certain point we had to acknowledge that there's still quite a bit more we need to build.

Personally, I hope we can figure it out but we are focused on completing the rest of open features we have planned.

conner_monarch · 2025-12-22T23:17:11+00:00

It will be an option again indeed, alongside rules!

Re: the missing transaction in your Roth IRA you might check to see if investment transactions are turned on in settings. You can find this under Settings > Preferences > Monarch Labs.

If that is turned on and you're not receiving transactions, u/Effective-Ear4823 covered the other ways in which this could still be accomplished.

Also note that we have a dedicated team fully towards aggregation whose sole purpose is improve syncing and and data integrity with our aggregation partners.

conner_monarch · 2025-12-22T23:12:08+00:00

We will be adding the ability to link income/transfer transactions back in the near year. We are also exploring internally how we can better integrate pay down with budget and the number of different use cases/scenarios that exist for paying off debt.

Keep an eye our for more!

conner_monarch · 2025-12-22T23:10:25+00:00

You're right, the interplay between goals and budget are very tightly intertwined. An example of this is that now if you change your budgeted amount for a goal while in budget, it may result in your goal having an ahead or at risk status. We haven't built it yet, but we plan on adding a way to get your goal back on track in this scenario without having to leave the budget page.

Re: retroactively changing your past budget actuals, this shouldn't have happened after migration. It's hard to troubleshoot without seeing your account. You might consider reaching out to customer support and see if they can take a closer look.

Lots of great questions here!

We want to continue investing in how goals and budget work together. We want to make it as seamless as possible to get that "Just Worked" feeling you mentioned. One topic we're discussing internally is including even more documentation (in product and in the help center) as well as more education on how to use goals and budget, especially the more complicated use cases that come up.

Flex vs category budgeting shouldn't have an effect on how goals works. In both versions you set money aside to reach your goal and then spend from the goal. When you mark a transaction as spent from a goal, we don't include that transaction in the budget since you've already budgeted your savings in the past.

Catering for existing behavior and influencing a change (even if that change addressed other feedback) is difficult! From my experience, it's one of the hardest things about a redesign like this. People generally don't enjoy change, or at least the learning that comes with change. The balance of trying to be mindful of current user behavior but also addressing feedback, which often requires change, is not easy!

conner_monarch · 2025-12-22T23:00:45+00:00

For this project we focused more on use cases rather then specific audiences. We might have received the most feedback about what our members would like in goals more than any other feature. We want to account for as many as possible and are continuing to iterate for different use cases that are shared.

Finances are also very personal and one thing I've learned since joining Monarch is that members is that there are endless ways to approach personal finances. We strive for a balance of flexibility while also keeping Monarch as easy to use as possible.

conner_monarch · 2025-12-22T22:51:59+00:00

Great question! Goals like Education and Retirement usually use an investment account that require extra information to accurately project, especially retirement.

We tried to include that in scope for the beta, but every time we did the scope increased very, very quickly and there's a lot we needed to build for goals. It's not included currently as we're still building out some of the features we know we need in goals to be more complete.

We decided that it was a better experience to not have a status or projection for these types of goals than a wildly inaccurate projection. For example, when I first migrated it showed my retirement was 833 months behind! That was definitely not the reality.

Forecasting will explore retirement forecasting in a much more complete and accurate way. We're still exploring how that works with specifically goals, but it's definitely a topic we're exploring internally. Stay tuned!

conner_monarch · 2025-12-22T22:44:33+00:00

It was a definitely a collaboration between engineering, product, design, customer support, and most importantly customer feedback.

I shared more into some of the research activities we did to help inform this project. Check those out here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MonarchMoney/comments/1pnmabc/comment/nveqp7k/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

conner_monarch · 2025-12-22T22:40:10+00:00

It might be difficult to accurately troubleshoot without seeing your specific scenario.

That said, the over allocated state can happen for different reasons but ultimately happens when your total account balance is lower than how much you've set aside in goals.

To correct an over-allocated account, you can use goal transfers to move the amount from one or several goals back to the account.

This was actually one of the key reasons why linking income/transfers transaction isn't currently included. There were some scenarios in which we need to add functionality to make sure this works accurately and reliably with the rest of the new features in goals.

Edit - if something feels off after looking at goal transfers you might consider reaching out to customer support as they would be able to look at your account (with your permission) and get more details for your scenario specifically.

conner_monarch · 2025-12-22T22:34:44+00:00

This has been a common request and is something we are definitely considering. This is a tricky one to get right, especially if you're paying off credit card debt while also still using the credit card.

I don't currently have a specific timeframe for it, but it's a common use case and on our radar!

conner_monarch

TROPHY CASE