We use it to handle all of our supplier bills, expenses and the reconciliation.
Our company would love to have the ability to make outbound payments too - we collect money on behalf of our clients and need to make weekly payouts. Our system calculates all of this but it means that we have to login into our current bank and create the payments.
We have just had our Monzo business account opened and are happy to trial it but the bank feed/export is the killer function that will decide if we stay with it long term.
For me, a contractor operating through a limited company, these are key.
Invoicing and billing clients
I would love to be able to submit invoices electronically to my clients, and for Monzo to reconcile these when they’re paid. I manually do this through Excel right now. I have to check my Lloyds bank statement and verify that I’ve billed for x and received x in my account. I have to manually chase if payments are not made, which is a bit frustrating.
Expense management
I would love to be able to tag items I’ve paid for from my personal account, with a photo of the receipt, as a business expense. I can then view this in an expense list on my Monzo business account. Then monthly, I can press ‘pay expenses’ which will transfer the expense total to my personal account. An added bonus here would be the ability to send these expenses in a report to my accountant.
Right now, I pay for item with my personal account and keep a receipt. I then store these and at the end of the month, pay the total into my personal account from my business account. I then print the latest statement from my business account and attach my receipts and post the to my accountant. This is a crap process. I’d love to:
Pay for item with Monzo personal account, tag as business expense and take a photo of the receipt.
Log these in my Monzo business account as expenses pending and at the end of the month, for example, have the money paid into my personal account. Logging things like mileage etc. would also be good.
Have the ability to then export/send my monthly business account statement, along with all receipts I’ve snapped to my accountant.
If you could do that, I’d pay a lot for this account.
Tax calculation
One thing I need to get better at is calculating my estimated corporation tax, VAT due, and also my personal tax liability. If Monzo could calculate an estimated corporation tax and VAT bill and move this into a pot for me, e.g., I invoice for £10k, and Monzo takes of £2k for corporation tax and the 16.5% for VAT and keeps these in pots so when I come to pay dividends etc. I don’t need to do a manual calculation each time.
I also pay myself a monthly salary and quarterly dividends. I pay my personal tax through self-assessment bi-annually, so a running estimate of my tax liability would be an added bonus.
Great to hear that Monzo are progressing their Business Banking options - I have been investigating this with other banks and platforms.
In order for me to migrate my business to Monzo I would like the following:
Accounting software integration
Invoicing and billing clients (including the potential to add VAT and add Discounts to a particular line)
Expense management (I assume this will follow a similar model to your current monzo where you receive a notification to your phone when an expense is charged and you can add a photograph of a receipt)
Budgeting categories
Cashflow management
Tax calculation
Payment reconciliation - an option to reconcile a payment with an invoice.
Similar POTS feature where you can assign money to different things without transferring it out of your account.
So basically, blurring some of those lines between a business bank and an accountant to streamline the invoicing / expenses workload.
For me as a one man sole trader is just the ability to get my statements over to my accountant. But you need to be able to go back to the beginning of the previous tax year.
January just gone I had to have my statements from April 2017.
Accounting software integration is a must have to function as a business account. That being said, if at first there is only a developer API similar to the consumer one; I would just rig up my own integration in the meantime.
However I would like to encourage you to consider some of the items on your list which often belong in dedicated accounting software. I fundamentally trust Monzo, not just as a bank but as a tech organisation. I trust you far more than I trust my company’s accountant to operate compliantly and effectively. Also I dislike the separation of concerns between my businesses financial services providers. If, as I expect, I move my business’ banking to Monzo once I can, it will be intensely frustrating to have the usual great Monzo experience on the banking side but still be stuck with the comparatively shoddy experience from my accounting tool.
I’d love to have Xero integration for your business account. It’s not absolutely essential as I’m sure I can export the data for it in some way but it would be nice to make it easier to sync.
A simple way to download transactions in a machine readable form (CSV / TSV). With my current bank there is a “download recent” that does anything since last download. This interface must not be obscure and circuitous like the API to submit a VAT return via “Making Tax Difficult”.
I don’t require it but perhaps a uuid to uniquely identify transactions.
I’m not interested in freebies. If you have money to splash out on perks, I’d rather have interest on my balance. Even if this was a variable bonus. I don’t want discounted coffee from a shop no where near me, air miles to a destination I don’t want to go to, travel insurance that duplicates what I already have or free cinema tickets.
I would also be disappointed if monzo started to adopt “brand new customers only” offers.
(Oops. My feedback seems to have turned into a rant. Too many free espressos?)
Can the Monzo app interface with the NFC reader on the phone and accept contactless payments. I’m quite sure this would be useful for personal banking as well as business users.
If it is not technically possible to accept card payments, will this work with Apple / Google pay?
(And there’s probably a lawyer making money out of making this difficult)
Definitely accounting software…
I have a card and cash business, I’m trying to get my clients to pay by card but, unfortunately not everybody wants too.
I know the post office offers a cash & check facility with other online banks! It would be fantastic if Monzo could arrange this facility.
I do some business in Europe and use TransferWise, again they have an arrangement with N26 which helps me with European payments without loosing money with the excessive exchange rates.
Have a great week!
Aiden Bailey
My accountancy firm are always asked for recommendations on business banking and it would be good to get an affiliation/partner programme in place for referrals.
We also find it imperative that a bank can integrate with bookkeeping software and my firm’s recommended and most used software is Pandle.
They have an open API for the developers to build integration in.
Accounting software integration
(Xero, possibly another integration that lets me capture receipt data)
Budgeting categories -
(personal categories aren’t very helpful for a business account)
International payments / foreign exchange
(transferwise integration?)
Connect my other bank accounts and cards within the app (business credit cards)
Medium
Expense management
(would be cool if transactions I tagged as expenses on my personal monzo account could be used to create an expense report in the monzo business app)
Important business dates, when I have to pay taxes, file accounts etc in app would be amazing
Low
Partner perks as a business
(Business insurance, gadget insurance)
I would need Xero integration before I could switch, so my Monzo transactions are automatically imported into Xero for reconciliation with my receipts.
For us, the highest priority is definitely integration with accounting software (FreeAgent) - at the moment I’m manually recording transactions (usually daily) and then importing once a month with the Monzo App export function (just to make everything go green rather than the merky manual purple).
I’m not particularly interested in the Bank being able to do the functions of the accounting software at the moment - it’d have to match FreeAgent to consider switching that over and I’m not sure all of it (general accounts/bookkeeping, VAT/MTD, CorpTax, Payroll, tracking dividends, Self Assessment for directors etc) is really in scope of Banking. I’d rather focus on the banking side - Monzo.me payments (as mentioned above) would be a really good idea.