Bill Splitting 4

(James Smith) #1

This idea came to me when I went bowling with friends. I paid for a group of 4 (£40) then the other 3 all sent me their respective £10’s via monzo.

Therefore I had effectively spent a net of £10 on ‘Entertainment’. However, monzo still thinks I have spent £40 on entertainment. If I were able to categorise income from friends, I could have netted off their £10’s against the £40 and therefore my spending total for the month would be accurate.

But instead I have to remember ‘ohh I actually didn’t spend so much this month because people sent me money for X, Y and Z’.

I think this would be a really useful and simple feature.

(Tom Warren) #2

Hi James,

Great idea! You’re not alone in thinking this either, take a look over here…

#3

This is a really big concern of mine. Monthly targets basically become useless as the payment I have received aren’t reflected.

Is a simple solution to just be able to apply your own category on an incoming payment from someone?

#4

@julias I think this is the most reliable solution, although it maybe could get annoying.

The other option is to have a hidden field on Monzo.me that’s filled in by the app with the transaction ID so that it can be automatically allocated.

There’s also the option of just using some kind of ML algorithm to detect if incoming payments are part of a previous payment. Not sure about the feasibility of this.

(Daniel) #5

Any update on this? I’ve been waiting for this since I joined Monzo, to me it’s critical to ever use Monzo as a serious finance/budget app. Surely it’s not that hard to implement? Refunds are already categorisable. The majority of your users will be experiencing this problem regularly.

#6

In case you were unaware they have been working on the imminent roll out of full current accounts with debit cards which will replace the prepaid cards that they will cease to issue. This requires different systems and connectivity and rewriting existing app code. Therefore this can’t be high in their priorities at the moment!

(Daniel) #7

Targets are broken without this feature and targets were launched 6 months ago… was it a priority then?

(Alex Sherwood) #8

This is certainly something that needs to be addressed & I’m hopeful that it will be fixed either when the current accounts launch or when the targets are reviewed afterwards.

However I think you might be overstating the impact of the issue, personally I receive credits from refunds / payments from other users pretty infrequently.

If you’re desperate to avoid this limitation impacting your targets then you can adjust (increase) them, whenever you receive an incoming payment / refund.

Monzo have released several full features i.e. Monzo.me, since the targets launched & I’m glad that they focused on those, plus the current accounts, rather than fixing this bug. Sometimes an issue that appears simple to solve, isn’t because of everything that’s linked to it in the background.

(Daniel) #9

I live with my girlfriend so I’d say every 3rd purchase is a shared purchase. I’m currently having to input every purchase I make, accounting for split items, into a separate app called ‘Pennies’ to successfully budget/target. Increasing targets doesn’t give you an accurate representation of what you have spent and ruins your budget amount, plus it can only be increase by 5 so isn’t accurate anyway.

Monzo.me is fantastic as are other features but to me they have moved on to the next exciting new features before the previous feature was finished which is not a good way to operate and could cause bigger issues with bigger ‘bank’ features. I understand it might not be be as simple as I think but it must be simpler than developing these whole new features.

If I’m alone with this issue then I get why it’s been neglected but I really can’t believe other people living with partners and housemates don’t experience this daily, don’t use the targets feature they worked so hard on because of it and end up wasting time using other apps as solutions.

(Daniel) #10

Btw, I ‘bought’ into Monzo because of the Targets feature and how it was ‘sold’, I came onboard as it was launched. I’m glad I did as I love the other features and have even signed up 4 friends and family. But as you can probably tell I feel like it’s a bit of a kick in the groin to still not be able to use the feature I signed up for 6 months ago.

(Patrick) #11

At least you have the Targets feature, could be worse, you could be on the Android app.

Anyway, what does it say on your card bellow Monzo? You haven’t “bought” anything, nothing has been “sold”, Monzo product is not even on sale yet. This is just a taste of what they are cooking at the moment, give them a chance to build it!

(Daniel) #12

:+1: thank you for explaining in detail what my use of quotation marks on those words were intended to do.

And you’re right they do need time to build it. However it’s confusing to me that as of recently I can now add a picture to my app - a cosmetic new feature - but I can’t use a budget feature that was released 6 months ago because of an known and unresolved issue.

As far as I can tell the trello board is a few months behind on the more budgeting update, I understand they have been busy with launching the bank :clap: but other smaller features have come out while this issue has been left unresolved.

I’d love an update from the team on some kind of realistic timeline on when it might be fixed as I’ve been patiently waiting for 6 months for it and posted in the forum about it multiple times and none the wiser. I really don’t want to sound like I’m not happy with Monzo, like I said I’m glad I have it.

(Patrick) #13

Fair enough, I get what you are saying. :+1:

If large chunks of code relating to certain services (categories, P2P Payments, Targets) are going to get completely reworked and changed in prep for current accounts, would it not be more wasteful to spend time fixing relatively minor things on these soon to be obsolete chunks of code? :thinking: The other cosmetic features may not be that superficial after all, profiles might be an extremely important central feature were all future current accounts and sub-services gel together. Photos I suspect are just a cool Monzo touch to an important feature that had to be developed at this time.

Criticise all you want, I’m sure Monzo appreciate the feedback. I was just remembering that we are in Beta and should be OK with an imperfect, irregular service while Monzo work through their strategy for perfection at current account phase out.

(Sacha) #14

Just want to add to the call for the ability to ‘tag’ Monzo.Me receipts. Started using it a lot more with my girlfriend to split costs but it makes it nigh on impossible to identify my true spend within the relevant tab.

(Patrick) #15

It looks like Monzo will not be releasing budgeting on Android for pre-paid cards and will only be available on new current accounts “to avoid building it twice”. Looks like I may have been right. Would certainly make more sense to build properly on the current account side and not spend much time fixing relatively minor issues on code which will soon be obsolete (targets for iPhone on pre-paid cards)

#16

Just curious if for Monzo that’s a “we’ve been building it for the current accounts behind the scenes and it will be out along with current account release or shortly after” or its a “when the current accounts are rolled out we will start working on it”.

If it’s the latter then I can see a lot more people on Android being annoyed at being left behind once again as it could then take months after current account release for that feature to be implemented. (iOS user so doesn’t impact me)

(Tom) #18

Just adding another vote to be able to categorise payments that result from splitting the bill so my spending is accurately reflected.

Ideally, if one split a bill, this would mean all payments received from doing that:

  • reflected that payment’s category (for target purposes)
  • showed up in the detail of original transaction too, so you could check everyone had paid you back for that thing
(Ben) #19

Also think this should have been part of bill splitting/targets from the get go. Agreed with the above comment about linking them to original transaction too (bit more of a nice to have though)

(Sam) #20

Example:
Let’s say you spent £10 and sent a link to another monzo user to split the bill and they send you £5. You’re net spend would be £5. However, currently in the spending tab, it would still show as a £10 spend.

Can this be fixed so that spending summaries are accurate?

(Andy Hughes) #21

This is a much needed feature! I quite often split large costs with my wife and it ends up looking like my outgoings are much higher than my earnings. It makes actually tracking what I’ve spent really difficult.