Monarch: Budget & Track Money

Like a lot of budgeting apps, most new and interesting functionality is limited to American customers with Canadian users left off of their roadmap.

I was told this is the best budgeting app in the market and it was until it started inverting my transactions. I reached out to get help. Simon asked me to send information on the transactions I was having problems with. I did, I sent a detailed response with screenshots shots to clearly deliver my problem. After a week of waiting for a resolve the customer service representative, instead of helping me to fix things, he decided to explain to me what transactions are like I didn’t know! If I wanted transactions explained I can go to Google and it will do that for me. Highly suggest staying away! Cause once this app stops working for you, your frustration goes up and they won’t help you at all. So you are left starting over in another app anyhow.

Nice app but doesnt sync properly with RBC bank in Canada. Too bad.

This app works easier and better than what is out there. Sometimes there are syncing issues but they tend to get worked out within a couple of days. We had one issue where TD erased transactions but Monarch was able to go to the backups to restore them. The best for our family is the ability track categories we’ve created as well as merchants. The app automatically tracks monthly spend over previous month or previous 12 month monthly average.

App (both mobile and web) are both excellent. Clean UI and surface most of the stuff I’m interested in. But the sync still needs attention. Several of my accounts disconnect on a daily basis. So every day I’m getting emailed warnings about institution disconnections at 2am, and then every time I log into the app I need to spend 5 minutes entering security questions or typing in one time password codes. To me, data sync is the bedrock of a personal financial management product. It needs to be perfect. I know it’s a very difficult problem to solve, but I’d happily give up any new functionality in the app for the next year if it meant my accounts all stayed in sync indefinitely.

It works well for the most part, but recently there is no way to split transaction in the app, which is very annoying since I use it pretty often for quick and immediate update

I looked for a long time for a replacement for Mint. I finally found Monarch and while I was nervous to have to pay I needed something and this looked promising. At first everything was going well, then my accounts somehow forgot transactions. Put in a ticket and they said it was a one off. Fine then this month again started out good, but then again, transactions that were there are not, so my budget isn’t correct. Emailed again and after several days they send me a generic email saying they are swamped with tickets an that it’ll be several days before they can get to mine. It’s already been a week! It’s not looking so good anymore. I do like the setup, and how intuitive it is and the info I get from it. Will be nice if/when it’s actually correct info!

The app is well designed and definitely worth the subscription. Unfortunately, doesn’t work well with the Canadian Bank, CIBC which likely is the source and cause of not-syncing seamlessly with this app.

Although Monarch worked very well for me when I first started using it, I never connects to my bank accounts anymore. As someone who likes tracking my spending on a daily basis, it’s not really reliable and always has connection failures. Better suited for those who only want to track their budget on a monthly basis.

Not only is the subscription insanely high, but it also prompts you to create an account and pay before you can use the app. It's not worth it at all.