This chart shows income and expenditure over the period of the connection and calculates the disposable income month by month. Additionally this is compared to the most recent month.

As a result, Loans Officers are able to view changes to disposable income over time and note any recent positive or negative changes.

Note: In most cases the period of the connection will be 12 months. However, this may be less if the account has been recently opened or the bank provides a connection for a shorter period of time.

To spot a newly opened account, read the section at the end of this article.

To understand more about the breakdown of income over time, please read Open Banking: Income breakdown over time.

The trend is based on the percentage change, not the percentage difference. Therefore the equation used is:

Where V1 is the average balance over the period of the connection and V2 is the value during the most recent month.

Therefore in the above example, the calculations are as follows:

Total expenditure

Total income:

Disposable income:

So in the example above, expenditure has decreased by 10%, income by 5%. As a result disposable income is up 358%.

Note:

Conversely any increase in expenditure is treated as a negative and colour-coded red:

You can hover over any of the points in the line chart to view the amount of income or expenditure for that month:

Similarly, you can hover over the disposable income bar charts to view disposable income for a particular month:

In the example above there is a peak in income during September. Outside of this period, spend and money received are fairly consistent.

To understand such a trend, it may be useful to investigate the transactional data. To do so you can either click on a category of the income donut, a category of the Income breakdown bar chart or a category from the ‘Latest month compared to previous months’ table.

Doing so will load the transactions associated with that category in the transactions table at the bottom of the page.

Here you can use the search option to load particular transactions using any of the data points present in the columns, including reference/partial reference, amount, and date.

In this case clicking Universal Credit and entering and entering 09-2022 in the search box showed a backdated payment:

In this example a search of transactions found that the applicant sold and bought a vehicle in April:

The default view is to see trends for net disposable income, expenditure and income over the period of the connection:

However, you can also 'switch off' any of these items. In the chart below net disposable income has been removed so you can see the relationship between income and expenditure only:

In this chart income and expenditure have been de-selected so only disposable income remains:

In many cases the income and expenditure will be fairly consistent:

In the example below there's a positive trend for expenditure and disposable income. It is only slight, but whilst income has fallen by 1%, expenditure has fallen by 3%, pushing disposable income into positive territory:

In the example below, the trend arrow for expenditure has been consistent, but income has fallen in the last month having a significant impact on disposable income:

Often the picture is mixed. In the example below income is up 56%. However, expenditure is up 70%. Consequently, net disposable income has fallen by over 100%:

In this example the disposable income is consistently high, however in the most recent month it has fallen:

If a chart shows a start balance of zero, this is probably a new bank account:

This can be verified by looking at the spending analysis period.

In this example the connection was only available from September because the bank account was opened at that point in time:

This is part of series on Open Banking. You may also want to read about: