The dashboard includes a tab called 'spending'. This is where you will find the results of the connection for Open Banking data. These data are shown as a Spend Financial Health Indicator using the 50/30/20 budgeting rule.

This article deals with the overview of spending through the spending donut at the top of the dashboard.

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

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The tab displays a spending overview according to the 50/30/20 rule. 

The method is simple. Households split their income into three different categories: essentials (needs: 50%. Flexible spending (wants: 30%). And financial goals (plans: 20%). Housekeeping, bills and transport fall into the first category. General shopping, restaurants, hotels and holidays are not essential. They’re classified as ‘wants’. Finally, 20% is spent on financial goals. Paying down debt, saving for the future.

In most cases transactions relating to a single bank account are returned.

However, in some cases multiple accounts are held with the same institution.

For example, there may be a current account, savings balance and a credit card - all with one provider and all accessed via one online account / login. In these cases transaction data is returned for all these accounts.

Where possible, 12 months' of transactions are retrieved.

However, this can vary from bank to bank because some institutions only provide data over a shorter period of time, e.g. six months. This is especially the case for credit cards.

Where there's more than one account associated with an online connection (like the example above) NestEgg will retrieve transactions for the period allowed by the account with the least coverage. This may mean less than 12 months' of data is returned.

For example, there may be a current account where there are 12 months' transactions and a credit card with six months' transaction data. In this case NestEgg will provide six months' of transactions.

This is because if data were returned for 12 months' of current account transactions and six months' of credit card transactions there would be an inconsistency between the two sets of data. The most recent six months' of spend information would be complete (because credit card transactions are included) and the earlier six months incomplete (because credit card transactions are excluded). This would give a false picture income and expenditure, making it look like expenditure had increased during the last six months because more transaction data were available.

The Spend Financial Health Indicator is designed to give an at a glance overview of income and expenditure, with the latter split between needs, wants and commitments.

Inside each donut is a number. This represents the monthly average for income, needs, wants and commitments.

The period for which data has been used to populate these donuts is shown at the top of the spend tab. In the example below the period is for 1st March 2021 to 31st January 2022. Note that transaction details may be available outside of these dates (see Spend FHI period covered, below).

In the example above this means, on average, during the period between 1st March 2021 to 31st January 2022 £529 was spent each month on commitments. £2,974 was spent on wants.

The number in the high level spend summary is the average disposable income over the period for which transactions have been returned. In the example below the average monthly deficit is £6:

The information displayed in all of the donuts is for complete months. This also applies to the numbers shown inside each donut.

Consequently, if the open banking connection is made part way through a month the donuts will show a summary for the complete months only.

For example, if someone connects on the 14th of February 2022, and transaction data was pulled back to 15th February 2021, the data feeding into the summary donuts would be for 1st March 2021 to 31st January 2022 - i.e. the complete months.

However, a Loans Officer will still want to ensure that there haven't been any very recent changes to income or spending. Therefore the transactions in the table below the summary donuts will include the entire period. In the example above transactions will be shown from 15th February 2021 to 14th February 2022, but the donuts will show average spend from 1st March 2021 to 31st January 2022.

Transaction data will be deleted 30 days after the date of the application / automated decision date.

The high level summary donuts will remain.

Please read this article to understand how transactions are categorised.
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