Iām a product tester in the Social team here. Weāre thinking about how we can improve social features like Split the Bill, Shared Tabs and paying friends on Monzo, and weād like your input!
Weāre looking for thoughts on:
what you love, and find most useful, about these features
anything you find hard to use or understand
anything you canāt do that youād like to be able to
common misconceptions youāre aware of from chats with friends and family
things you wish youād known about these features
A quick search shows a few issues with Split the Bill and Shared Tabs. Weāve made a few changes to polish these already, including better splitting with friends who donāt have Monzo.
No comment is too big or small. Itās all helpful to us, and weāll do all we can to improve these features for everyone.
On this if I have a few to pay, each time I pay one Iām returned to the āhomeā tab and I then have to go back through PAYMENTS > SHARED to view the list and pay the next one.
Iād rather return back to the same screen or even better would be a bulk pay option.
Iāve always found this to be a PITA and it doesnāt really work as I expected.
So as an example I want to split a meal out, but theyāre not on Monzo. If I click on on share link it sends an invite to join Monzo but if I select someone who is already on monzo and then add this person who isnāt I can then share my Monzo.me link with them.
I would expect to be able to search for a non Monzo friend, then select them and send the link directly without having to āfakeā sending it to a monzo friend first
I donāt particularly love or use these features. Theyāre nice ideas but for me turned out to be not much more than a gimmick. Bill splits have potential but they need to be smarter. Itās too reliant on my friends and family to do things right. But more often than not Iāll get paid back with a regular old transfer, so in Monzo, those splits still look outstanding.
This still doesnāt work great in all honesty. In fact, I donāt think I could even identify a noticeable difference thatās made this better for my one Sibling that will only use Starling. The same sibling hellbent on being the only one using android and being without iMessage.
This might be controversial, but be Apple. Stop catering to work with people who bank elsewhere and focus on making this an amazing utility for people (and their friends) who actually use Monzo.
I donāt know if this counts, but Monzo.me needs a bit of TLC. For paying friends on Monzo, send me to the Monzo app! Bring back Apple Pay.
The one big thing Iād love to see from Monzo are shared pots. And greater coherence between this suite of features.
And some smarts to correct for user error that can make the features more frustrating to use. Please, if my friend sends me a transfer that exactly matches a bill split, or is close to it, after Iāve split a bill with them, be smart enough to recognise that the payment might be for that bill split. Even if itās just a prompt to ask me if the payment was for x bill and not automatic. It would be a huge improvement.
Iād just like to pop on and say Shared Tabs have kept me and my wife on Monzo.
Itās a feature we use daily and have used for years.
Our groceries, Amazon orders etc go on it and we can settle up whenever. Itās amazing, so thank you
A little quality of life improvement for Shared Tabs would be the ability to pay off a little bit, not just the whole amount.
The calculations +/- buttons are broken and make no sense at the moment. What even are the increments.
Also believe it should be made clearer to first time users on tabs that you need to work the splits top to bottom otherwise updating the other ones updates more than just one person.
Leading on from the above you should be able to ālockā someones amount. For example if i put in Ā£5 for person c and then lock the amount. Person a and b should then be split automatically for the remainder. This would help the flow
Sorry thought of another bug thats really annoying.
If someone requests a bill split for a transaction say āmanagement feesā. I then pay that bill split. If i search my feed for management fees this then doesnt come up.
I would really love the option to pay someone off over time! I have requested from my partner for our wedding and vice versa! I would love the option to pay a request off in chunks instead of in one go! The option of shared tabs doesnāt really work for this
On the note of shared tabs - This works great for us when weāve been travelling and is so easy to use!
Monzo.me - the limit of Ā£100 is sometimeās limiting and I am not entirely sure why this is there either.
My partner and I use shared tabs to split household bills, e.g. rent, electric etc. It would be great if we could automatically split a recurring bill each month. The UI would be similar to scheduling for a recurring payment to come from a pot. If a recurring payment is the same it should continue to split by the same amount it was set to initially.
I know some work has gone into the UI around this but I see splitting a payment and adding to a shared tab the same āthingā. It would make more sense to me to have a single āsplitā button on a transaction, and then instead of just having a list of contacts, have a list of shared tabs (if any) in the list first before the list of contacts.
This is a can of worms but I always think payments made by other people in a tab should count to my spending?
If the other person pays my household bills and I balance it out with council tax or something Iād still like to see my share of the household bills in my spending.
Super complicated I imagine but it means using the tab actually hides my outgoings .
Iād love to use a joint account for this but Monzo wonāt let us.
I remember having to message customer services way back when, then they made it editable in app. Iāve not looked since setting mine all those years ago.
This is very exciting, as I think there are lots of little things which could make this area fantastic.
Firstly, just want to massively echo all of this. This can be such a frustrating experience when trying to split different amounts with various people (and I know not social but the same goes for assigning multiple categories to one transaction - a ālockā would be brilliant!).
Secondly, echoing everyone really, but the ability to partially settle shared tabs would massively increase their utility.
Thirdly, this! My partner and I donāt use shared tabs because of the lack of partial payment, so we often have a lot of bill splits flying around (same goes for me and my friends too tbh), and the flow of repeatedly going back to Payments > Shared to pay multiple splits is a nightmare
Also agreeing with @N26throwaway re more smarts for payments that come in relating to split transactions.
At the very least, maybe I could mark a portion of a split as paid, rather than having to ācancelā the whole bill split (which also means this can only be done when everyone who is paying via the split request has actually paid)?
I find splitting the bill fantastically useful, so itās certainly mostly little annoyances, as opposed to wholesale issues.
Would absolutely love to be able to split the bill on connected account transactions:
These are showing up in Trends, theyāre supposedly not second-class citizens, so would be great to be able to split directly from them.
Currently, if I buy something on my Amex for a friend on Monzo, I then send a payment request for their portion.
So even just a quick way to pre-populate a payment request would be an improvement on the current situation.
And I think that brings me onto another small but annoying thingā¦
I am on iOS so I canāt rearrange my connected accounts to come before my joint account.
If I swipe through the carousel to get to a connected account feed, clicking on the Payments tab takes me to Payments for my joint account, even if I only landed on joint for the half second it took to scroll past (this does not happen if I open the accounts view and click straight to a connected account).
So it would be great to either let me rearrange all accounts (best) or at least fix this behaviour so I donāt find myself on my joint account interface just because I swiped past it.
