This isn’t Monzo specific; but in my mind it could work really well with Monzo!
So the idea is, I do a lot of online shopping and also a lot of returning (particularly with clothes, as they don’t always fit). To this day, every time I return something I write a little note somewhere to say that I’m expecting £XX.XX return from ‘X’ shop, and I’ll check my bank every now and then to see if it’s come through or not.
To make life easier, Monzo could have a feature to mark a purchase as ‘expecting refund’, or something similar and when a return has been made from that shop for that amount of £’s, we are notified and we don’t need to worry about it anymore. If in X number of days it still hasn’t been returned, Monzo tells us and we can follow-up with the shop.
Hope that makes sense!
What do people think / surely I’m not the only one who does this?
This sounds like it would be a really useful feature for me & I’m sure, for a lot of others too.
In the preview of the new design for the spending tab that Hugo shared recently, there was a dedicated section for ‘committed’ payments. I’m guessing that, that’ll display payments that’re scheduled but haven’t yet been made yet, bills would be an obvious examples but an Amazon order might be another.
It sounds like you need similar functionality but for ‘pending’ repayments. I haven’t seen anything to suggest that, that’s on the way yet but we haven’t had all of the details about these new designs yet so watch this space
One detail I’d like to add. I think we would need to be able to enter the amount we are expecting to be refunded. Sometimes I order multiple items from somewhere but only need to return one (clothes being an obvious example). So the Monzo app shouldn’t assume the refund will be for the whole of the original amount (though this could be the default, to make the process quicker in the majority of cases).
also there is the issue that sometimes debits and credits go thru with different merchant information or codes as one may be done on a POS machine and the other by their accounts dept or a different POS terminal and they then can’t be automatically matched so maybe manual involvement will be required on occassion.
also the currency issue. If purchass made in AUD or RUB for example instead of GBP if you pay $234.98 say and they refund that amount the original purchase may be at one rate but the refund a week or two later will be at the rate at that time so the GBP amounts will not match exactly, so you would need to match on original currency not account currency
I really like the idea of this functionality. It could work based on a exact amount match for an auto-match or a notification of a ‘close match’ for a manual-review? I often return one or two items from a multi-order and this would really help me keep track of what is where (rather than using Trello like I do at the moment!!).
