Help us understand what features you'd like to see in a Monzo business account!

1. What do you do? Are you a sole proprietor, contractor, limited company?

Single Director Ltd company at the moment but looking to move to co-director (Contractor)

2. What are the big pain points in managing your business finances? (think about things like invoices, expenses, payroll, taxes, etc.)

No real pain points - currently with TSB and not happy with service - can’t open savings account - can’t get an answer as to why not - can’t even download of CVS copy of a full months transactions.

3. What tools do you currently use to manage your business finances?

None - cashflow very small so don’t need anything.

4. What do you like / dislike about your current business bank account?

Like - honestly not much!
Dislike - lack of customer service, not being able to open a savings account, cvs downloads not downloading the full month

5. If you could request one key feature for your business current account, what would it be? Are there any other features you look for in a BCA?

I think I’m an easy potential customer - I’d like easy access to my account, to be able to download CVS statements that include ALL my transactions, I’d like to be able to open a savings acc easily, I’d like something that calculates how much I should put in savings for tax/VAT

I have an Monzo account currently and have managed to persuade all my family to now open accounts!! I would 100% recommend Monzo to anyone asking re a new account!!

Good luck guys,
K

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What do you do? Are you a sole proprietor, contractor, limited company?
Contractor / Ltd. company.

What are the big pain points in managing your business finances? (think about things like invoices, expenses, payroll, taxes, etc.)
Everything.

What tools do you currently use to manage your business finances?
Quickbooks, Starling Business Bank

What do you like / dislike about your current business bank account?
Starling
Likes:
- offer “Spaces”, similar to Monzo pots. This is useful for earmarking money for certain future expenses.
- allow me to group different recipients within a single contact, in other words, I can have ‘HMRC VAT’ and ‘HMRC Corporation Tax’ within the ‘HMRC’ contact
- Good UX, easy to do anything

Dislikes:
- Poor customer support (slow to respond, poor in-app chat support interface)
- My Starling business account is tied to my Starling personal account under the same Starling account & phone number. This isn’t right from an organisational perspective as my Ltd. company has nothing to do with personal banking. I’m not sure how Monzo can solve this, but the ability to easily separate the two would be vital.

If you could request one key feature for your business current account, what would it be? Are there any other features you look for in a BCA?
A similar ‘marketplace’ feature like Starling Bank have, they are now integrating with Xero. I’d love something like this for Quickbooks!

Very excited to hear more about this!

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Is there a plan to credit score people for a business account cause that doesn’t help people who have low credit scores.

I think offering an account to all businesses with no restrictions in place would help with sole traders included as these people are the back bone of the economy not everyone has a limited company to own and are just self employed as it’s easiest form to deal with and I feel there should be accounts for sole traders other banks starting business account tie you in to being limited company and not all businesses are registered with companies house

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Integration with SAP and Concur for quick expense reporting

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Run a ltd. company that pretty much looks after just myself as a freelance television producer.

Mostly invoicing, and expenses, some more complicated assets such as equipment that depreciates.

Quickbooks. It took a while to get my head around, but now that I know it, I’d be reticent to learn something else. It’s essential that whatever you do can be accessed through quickbooks.

Fees. I totally get fees for when you have huge payroll and thousands of expenses, but I shouldn’t be paying £5 a month for them sitting on all my cash and earning interest on it.
It’d also be great to have a pot (similar to the current account) where I can put cash and earn interest on it for a month or two.

Can I suggest you get moving on launching a product asap. Your competitors are already out there, up and running. As an investor in Monzo, I’d very much like to see you at the forefront on this. You can refine it further once it’s up and running!! There are folks like me coming to the end of a fee-free period with a major bank. I need to move in the next few weeks and if I can’t switch to a fee-free Monzo account, it’ll be to a competitor.

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Same. Small company, in digital publishing, with two of us running it.

Pain point: More than one cards for a business account
I need to be able to give my Managing Director a card to use and access to the business account. Nobody will offer more than one card, not TransferWise, not Starling (I checked this morning) which quite frankly, is ridiculous, when you both make financial decisions and purchases for the business. We jointly need to be able to use the account.

Pain point: Direct Debits
We use TransferWise Borderless because we pay writers in the EU and US, but it’s kind of useless because they don’t allow direct debits. So we can pay one-offs, but not, for example, have a repeat payment to Adobe for our monthly bill. Given that most companies expect you to put in card details and be able to pull out the monthly amount automatically, it renders Borderless useless. We have all our vendor payments on direct debit, but because of this, I have to run those out of my old Lloyd’s account. I spoke to Starling and they allow direct debit but they don’t allow you to receive direct debits! So that is useless too. Please allow direct debit BOTH ways. It’s a basic, BASIC requirement. Money in, money out.

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It would be great to have a monzo business account, currently waiting with switching from my usual business account as although I’m Not happy with them the alternatives don’t seem great right now :confused:

  1. What do you do? Are you a sole proprietor, contractor, limited company?

Sole trader - I run a small fitness studio and also work online

  1. What are the big pain points in managing your business finances? (think about things like invoices, expenses, payroll, taxes, etc.)

Dealing with multiple currencies and accounting/end of year tax

  1. What tools do you currently use to manage your business finances?

Business account & PayPal, paper & pen for accouts

  1. What do you like / dislike about your current business bank account?

Monthly charges, fees for anything other than basic online transfers. No great functionality to their app

  1. If you could request one key feature for your business current account, what would it be? Are there any other features you look for in a BCA?

Ability to accept multiple currencies or for people to transfer in from non uk accounts without huge fees

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The thing I hate most about running a small business is that when I make my tax payments (and they end up being a lot of money even when you are a small business) I am ridiculously worried that i’m paying the large amount of money into the wrong account, never to be seen again. I am fastidious but recently had a letter from HMRC VAT to tell me I had overpaid by thousands (over £4K). It is worrying, I don’t know how it could happen and how to unpick the payments to make sense of it.

Here’s the suggestion. Monzo to hold your hand during these payments. Whether it’s a pop-up to say " hey, we can see you are paying your VAT. Rest assured that if this ends up in the wrong business account we have enough information to put it right." or even work with HMRC on APIs that give instant feedback - " Hey Andrew, we have confirmation that HRMC have applied your VAT payment to the company you are associated with “Team Awesome Ltd”. You paid 3 weeks early this time you absolute legend". "“It appears you are paying VAT but your VAT is not due yet, did you mean to pay your Corporate Tax which is currently due”.

In short:
Absolute certainty I’m paying HMRC.
Absolute certainty that I’m paying into a known and correct account.
If I mess up you can help me out of the mess.

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I’d really like to see you at monzo do a deal with coconut, they could be your business banking arm if the business, to me it seems like they have already done lots of the legwork regarding the legal and accounting elements and would therefore be able to give you a leg up the ladder in some form or another.

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I’d swap my business account to Monzo in an instant. Natwest currently charge me about £30 a month - yet they have fewer features. Even if you halved business banking costs, that could still add up to £1.5million revenue per 10,000 business accounts.
Being able to connect it up to quickbooks is important to me personally, unless you offered similar features making it easy to categorise expenses, transactions, exclude transactions, snap receipts as proof and easily come up with a final number minus expenses to submit to the taxman.
I’d also need to be able to pay in cash somewhere like my local post office.

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The biggest pain point for me is tracking spending, expenses and caculating taxes. So as a small ltd I’d want to see:

  • Business spending/income categories
  • Reporting around arbitrary year end showing income spending for the year
  • VAT reporting
  • Apple Pay
  • Multiple cards, ideally with cc protections
  • Let me pay HMRC within the app (with correct refs etc)

For monzo I think the long term goal should be to replace entirely the need for extra accounting software to categorise spending and generate reports, and even eventually to submit taxes. If going after business you need a completely separate set of categories and to auto-classify transactions and ideally give a tax estimate. Definitely need arbitrary year ends.

Small businesses happily spend 10x what they spend on banking on accounting services every year, most of which are pretty basic bookkeeping. Perhaps consider hiring an accountant to inform your product design for a business banking account.

Invoices I do myself and have no idea why they’d be a pain point, nor have I used them in accounts that offer them (Tide).

I’d have a look at coconut for this - they have very good expense categories which offer guidance. If you get bigger perhaps you can buy them at some point. Tide also is pretty good in this regard and offers custom categories though I think in a way categories tailored to those acceptable to HMRC is better. Neither are banks though so not great protection. Starling offers what I’d fear Monzo might try at first because it is easier - a reskinned personal account. I’ve tried them for the last year and will be moving away.

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Hi, I run an accountancy practice and one of the biggest issues that small businesses have is managing cashflow effectively.

Businesses owners often make decisions based on the figure that they see in the bank account (not in reports that may be available to them elsewhere). This often means that money that they shouldn’t spend, gets spent. Not just taxes, but their own directors earnings. Then if they have a bad month, or loose a client they are vulnerable.

I would love to see a business banking app that could be programmed to slice % off income amounts, and place in pots. So that the amount that remains in the main bank account is the ‘true’ amount. e.g.
A £1000 invoice is paid
20% goes straight in to the VAT savings pot
20% goes straight in to the CT savings pot
20% goes straight into owners drawings
20% goes in to salaries
That leaves 20% to cover all operational expenses (DDs & ad hoc spending).

The above is simplistic, as in reality the % allocations should be reviewed.
But ultimately when a director goes to make a purchase decision, he is only seeing any unspent amount in the 20% of operational expenses, Or they make a conscious decision to borrow from their tax account (but ideally these shouldn’t be easy to drawer from - perhaps a week to head off instant emotive decisions!).

Let me know if you you don’t build this, as you may see me crowdfunding to build myself!

Regarding your specific questions:

  1. What do you do? Are you a sole proprietor, contractor, limited company?
    Limited Company, as are my clients mostly.

  2. What are the big pain points in managing your business finances? (think about things like invoices, expenses, payroll, taxes, etc.)
    Cash flow - see above

  3. What tools do you currently use to manage your business finances?
    Xero/Spreadsheets

  4. What do you like / dislike about your current business bank account?
    I can’t auto-save, and so it’s very time intensive

  5. If you could request one key feature for your business current account, what would it be? Are there any other features you look for in a BCA?
    Automatic savings pots

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I hope this comes off. I’m a sole trader and have recently set up my own business.

I have signed up for Starling Business account because there was no Monzo one and I want to keep my business transactions separate to my personal Monzo ones. However it’s just not as good as Monzo.

I LOVE the fact that Monzo integrates with Expensify thought IFTT, i mark a receipt expenses upload and it gets sent to Expensify. Starling dont have any integration with anything. I can’t see me continuing to use it as it’s going to be a lot of admin when it comes to do my tax return. I’m almost certain you’ll build in this functionality to a business account as it’s already there in the personal account. So that’s the big one for me, And if you can integrate with one of the invoicing platforms too, I use Wave Apps, even better.

I hope you can get this up and running soon so I can ditch the Starling account!

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Hi Jordan,

  1. What do you do? Are you a sole proprietor, contractor, limited company? Joint director of a limited company, along with my wife. Although this is split 75/25 so I have “significant control” we both require a logon and debit card, so Starling is not suitable. This means we are stuck with a legacy bank (HSBC); website and app leave a lot to be desired, but are better than our original Co-op Bank account.

  2. What are the big pain points in managing your business finances? (think about things like invoices, expenses, payroll, taxes, etc.): Scanning receipts, linking these to transactions on the account, splitting out VAT, categorising transactions.

  3. What tools do you currently use to manage your business finances? Cashbook and VAT are done on spreadsheets, receipts scanned to PDF and filed systematically.

  4. What do you like / dislike about your current business bank account? Dislike monthly fees in exchange for no innovation (I’d be happy to pay the same amount if they were developing new features). Like the fact I can have a credit card (thus getting protection on purchases) but dislike the £32 p.a. fee! New version of app lets me see more transactions but still very clunky and have to enter username, password, 3 characters from a security code. Have they never heard of fingerprints? Dislike non-sterling transaction fees and rubbish exchange rates (many software licences are paid in USD or EUR).

  5. If you could request one key feature for your business current account, what would it be? Are there any other features you look for in a BCA?

One thing - pots! Currently I can only have one deposit account and everything has to go in there. Would like pots for corporation tax, VAT, cash available for dividends, holding pot for funds spent on credit card, etc.)

Also would like

  • to be able to note VAT and net amount on any transaction (as an exportable note)
  • auto (Flux), PDF or photo attachment for receipts
  • uploading and attachment of customer invoices to payments into account
  • categorisation of transactions
  • budget forecasting (as per Summary screen on Monzo personal account)
  • overdraft as an option
  • easy export of all transactions including receipt/invoice images with a logical, unique reference to link transaction to receipt. (I file my receipts with a filename of “yymmddnn merchantname” (where nn starts at 01 and increments if there’s more than one purchase per day)

Finally, for business I’d want a web interface for ease, as well as an app.

No doubt there’s more, but that would have me switching like a shot.

Chris

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Hi there.

We have a business account with a ‘new’ bank but not really happy with the user experience and the charges. They charge £25/month.

I also have another business and use HSBC for that which is much better and only charges £5.50/month.

We were limited in our choice of account as we’re an LLP and are equal partners in the business.

We’re really excited about the Monzo Business account as this would’ve been our ideal scenario this time last year!

From my perspective the most important things for the Monzo’s Biz account to have are:

  • Flexible and open to LLPs and companies with 2 directors needing equal access and approval rights

  • Good user experience online - needs to have a dashboard which allows you to download PDF statements for both the commercial card and the account

  • Option for having a virtual commercial card for subscription payments

  • Compatible with Quickbooks and other accountancy programmes for ease of invoicing and expenses

  • Happy to pay reasonable bank charges but based on account usage and profit

Looking forward to seeing the new Monzo Business service!

Thank you,

Charlotte

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I’m one of five directors at Leigh Hackspace CIC, a CIC is like a Ltd, except profits are reinvested and assets are there for the benefit of the public.

We currently have a Co-op bank account, it’s been an absolute pain with adding additional directors with the various forms and customer services not understanding their own processes.

Our main Tool is Xero, this is connected to our business bank account and syncs every so often. We also use GoCardless for membership subscriptions, and iZettle for card payments.

Processes aren’t very well documented and customer service don’t fully understand it so making a change to the bank account can take a while.

Multiple signatories, logins, cards.

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I’m the director of a limited company, which is currently dormant, so not in the market for a new account right now. It has the free banking for life deal from Santander, which I got when it was called Abbey National. The only bank now that does free business banking is Starling.

Web access is a must have, along with ability to integrate with accounting software and export to spreadsheet.

At work, we manage money for some pretty large international companies. We mostly use Barclays Wealth for that. Probably not your target market, we need things like bank guarantees and letters of credit, which legacy banks are good at, and the newer Fintech banks don’t offer. Also things like being able to set up payments, and not have them go out until another person approves it. Budgeting stuff is not important as we have our own software which integrates with the bank for that.

I think you need to segment the market into different types of business.

Contractors and Freelancers with one or maybe a few invoices per month that get paid by bank transfer: Their requirements will be very simlar to a personal account + the requirement to analyse stuff for tax purposes, so links to accounting software

Small traders who sell to the public and receive cash + card payments

Internet traders who need to accept online payments and interface with their selling platform

Business with multiple owners and more than one person operating the bank account

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I use quickfile for my company accounts.

The main feature I’d like to see is for the bank account to support the Open Banking protocol, so that any accounting package can get a bank feed directly into the accounts package without going through a third party like Yodlee. (I will not use third party screen scrapers like this because you have to give them your banking login details - which is a security risk).

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The times website ran an article saying that business banking is being trialled from tomorrow. How do I get in on that action?