Bill splitting made simple 🎉

[cookywook (Richard Cook)]

Introducing a new way to split payments with your friends.

Bill splitting made simple

[swok1080]

I was hoping that the monzo.me link would be unique to the transaction so that the split gets updated as paid

[kennydude (Joe)]

Is that autoplay video on a monzo blog

[MartinO (Martin)]

We had this discussion in the developer slack about this feature the other day and It would be good if you could explain the rational of releasing what is widely seen as an unfinished feature?

It’s going to be another feature that sit’s in the unready state for month’s that IMO should still be in labs joint accounts

I’ve see it way too often over the past several months that you’ve released an MVP and it’s sat in the MVP stage for months and it just leaves everybody wondering when it’s going to get updated to a a decent state rather than just the bare minimum.

Honestly It feels like stuff is getting released so you can blog about it and say HEY LOOK WHAT WE DID but really it should’ve had another few weeks work on it and it’d be in a much better position and then you really have something to shout about.

Would it not be better to wait until you have all the expected functionality such as the ability too add/remove after confirmed a split then you actually have something to shout about rather than you just trying to get SOMETHING out faster than your main competitor.

Just my two cents

@swok1080

I was hoping that the monzo.me link would be unique to the transaction so that the split gets updated as paid

Another example of something that’s missing that should be CORE functionality of this feature.

[Rob3 (Rob)]

Would be useful to split to a joint account and from a joint to a personal account. You can always move the money between the account but would be useful to move the transaction if paid with wrong account by mistake.

[theshillito (Peter Shillito)]

oops. tested it out with a generic non-monzo person and now i can’t cancel it or add anyone else…

[LancelotPayne]

Was just testing it out and now I’ve got a split transaction I can’t cancel with Friend 1 bit irritating as it’s just sitting there now seems as though this will need to be addressed soon, still it came out a bit too early there’s features that should be there but aren’t for example no photos for non Monzo users just friend 1, 2 etc doesn’t exactly look that aesthetically pleasing but hopefully this will improve over time.

[swok1080]

I really agree with the sentiment here; labs is available to everyone and we use the features accepting and in many cases enjoying testing any bugs found. There is a danger that for new customers the product just feels unpolished, which in some ways is worse than knowing there are features that are missing but in development.

[cookywook (Richard Cook)]

@kennydude

Is that autoplay video on a monzo blog

My bad, fixing that now!

[icedcoffee (Phil)]

This is such an improvement and I love it.
I know there are little things that can be done to make this and other features incredible, and I hope they do come. For now, this is such an improvement on anything else that exists.

I’d like to:

• Cancel/remove split payment if no longer required.
• Feature to exist in joint accounts (like other things on join accounts, which I trust are coming soon).
• The url is a bit lengthy.
• Percentages as well as amounts would be useful too.
• I think the mix of blog posts, updates and community engagement are excellent.

Who wants to split my McD’s fries from yesterday with me, for science.
https://monzo.me/philokane/0.54?d=%F0%9F%8D%94%20McDonald’s

[kieranmch (Kieran McHugh)]

@s8mb

And my girlfriend’s iPhone 6S can’t edit payments except in specified intervals – if she picks a £12 payment, she can only split it with me £6/£6 or £1/£11 (this is working fine on my Pixel 2 XL). Seems like a poor implementation of a core feature.

You can tap the amount to set a custom amount per person. I have passed the feedback onto the team.

[RossA (Andrew Ross)]

It worked @icedcoffee. Fries seemed expensive though!

Might try - in interests of science - to split my mortgage now!

[icedcoffee (Phil)]

Awesome. You did that!
I returned the gesture with a train emoji!

But I will also return the 54 pence.

[robinb (Robin Bilgil)]

Cross-posting this from the labs thread!

Labs Feedback: Bill Splitting

I’m happy to announce that bill splitting has left labs, and we’ve rolled it out the wide world of all Monzo users! Thanks so much for using it over the last month and providing loads of feedback. We’ve fixed the show-stopping bugs you reported and added the top-requested missing feature of adding non-monzo users. We’d like to think bill splitting is in good shape as a successor to the old functionality (“Split cost with monzo.me”), and I hope you agree it’s a good step in the right direction. …

[MartinO (Martin)]

@robinb

I’m happy to announce that bill splitting has left labs, and we’ve rolled it out the wide world of all Monzo users! Thanks so much for using it over the last month and providing loads of feedback. We’ve fixed the show-stopping bugs you reported and added the top-requested missing feature of adding non-monzo users. We’d like to think bill splitting is in good shape as a successor to the old functionality (“Split cost with monzo.me”), and I hope you agree it’s a good step in the right direction. …

Firstly thanks for taking the time to reply. But i’m still really confused upon why this was released. Yes this is better than the “Split the cost with monzo.me” functionality but there’s still loads to be desired from this. I think you can see a large amount of the posts from here are people saying that it doesn’t do everything they would want.

Unfortunately I think many recent releases fall into this category and I don’t understand what the obsession with pushing out so many unfinished features are. Labs is available to everyone and anyone can use it and enable these extra unfinished features which is exactly what this is.

Why not make more of a push for more testing of features that are in labs if you want people to test them rather than pushing them out as “Feature full releases” and blogging about them.

[tristan (Tristan Thomas)]

@MartinO

Firstly thanks for taking the time to reply. But i’m still really confused upon why this was released. Yes this is better than the “Split the cost with monzo.me” functionality but there’s still loads to be desired from this. I think you can see a large amount of the posts from here are people saying that it doesn’t do everything they would want.

Unfortunately I think many recent releases fall into this category and I don’t understand what the obsession with pushing out so many unfinished features are. Labs is available to everyone and anyone can use it and enable these extra unfinished features which is exactly what this is.

I’d highly recommend you read the section entitled “What’s an Alpha?” in this blog post from October 2015: https://monzo.com/blog/2015/10/30/we-are-ready/ I don’t think our approach to product development has changed since then Maybe we should write a whole blog post about it to make it really clear.

[Feathers (MikeF)]

@MartinO

Yes this is better than the “Split the cost with monzo.me” functionality

To a degree, I think you’ve answered your own question there.

If it’s better than what was previously available then surely this release is a step forward?

[nathanthomson8 (Nathan)]

I think one of the main grievances here is people don’t like to see a feature released out of labs that is clearly unfinished… and then left for months before it is looked at again like “Summary”.

[Chris_R (Chris Rimell)]

This is, in a nutshell, iterative development. And I know personally that traditional banks are adapting their approaches now to match that of fintechs because their development cycles have taken many many months to release products features into live. They are realising the benefits of developing in small chunks and releasing then enhancing.

I do think it would be helpful for Monzo to have a newer blog post explaining where they are at with dev cycles and linking to this every time then release a feature. It’s important that we all are told/reminded in my view.

[Feathers (MikeF)]

@nathanthomson8

I think one of the main grievances here is people don’t like to see a feature released out of labs that is clearly unfinished… and then left for months before it is looked at again like “Summary”.

No feature is ever ‘finished’ or at least no two people (i.e. customers) will ever agree what ‘finished’ is supposed to look like so that way lies paralysis and an inability to release anything. (OK, there’s an exaggeration in there but the point is valid I think.)