June 1, 2019
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Life at Cleo

You keep making categories that make no sense. We're into it ❤️

A shout out to the gym-going, pet-owning, wedding-planning, book-reading, vape-smokers out there.

You can make custom categories to help manage your money in a more personalised way.

Nice fact for you: the 5th most added custom category is "Charity".

10 most popular custom categories in the UK, USA & Ireland out of 600,000 users

Another nice fact: more people have created a category for gifts than all the haircuts / manicures / treat categories put together. You’re all v. selfless, congrats.

Categories. Why.

The main benefit you get from splitting up your spending habits into categories is to keep an eye on areas you want to watch a bit more closely. We added the option to pick your own categories because Cleo's on a 99.8% success rate of getting them right. She needs a little help sometimes.

(Ideally we’ll live in a world where you don’t have to convince Cleo that your trip to Pets at Home isn’t part of your grocery bill. You eat human food. We know that, really.)

From the labels you’re adding, we’re learning a lot. For example Medical Bills (boo) is a massive additional cost that has crept its way into our top ten and onto our radar. It also teaches us which spending areas we need to help you keep an eye on.

Some trends

Some problems

Variation. The creativity of your names for similar categories, won't lie, is throwing our data.

A rose by any other name will still get you drunk

Emojis. There's a whole bunch of you using emojis as category labels - we have no idea what you want us to build. Drop us a tweet if you can help us de-code any of these:

User submitted categories meaning ????

And a genius way of looking at money that one person tried out. This is a great idea but it really, really, really confuses Cleo when you try and play the weekly Game.

We love this way of thinking about money

Thanks for keeping Cleo learning ?

Team Cleo

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General

How to prepare for a recession

Recessions are out of our immediate control and though it seems unfair, there's still no Sims-esque hack for multiplying our money (we'll let you know as soon as we find one). The good news is that they’re part of the normal economic cycle. Unfortunately, we can’t cancel 2020 (though we can reset it). We can dance in the flames of this dumpster fire of a year once we tackle how to prepare for a recession by optimizing our financial support system. Luckily for you, Cleo’s got some hacks and has your back.

Monday, May 18, 2020
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Screenshot of the chat screen and paycheck breakdown feature