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

Monzo Chat Business Banking
123
  1. What do you do? Are you a sole proprietor, contractor, limited company?

Ltd Co - US tax for non US people. Primarily individuals and some corporate.

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

I use quickfile for bookkeeping and VAT returns. It uses API so transactions from Santander, Tide and Paypal (rarely use as high % fees) download automatically for reconciliation.

Also have accounts with Aldermore (Vat/Corp tax savings both fixed and easy access), Transferwise (USD receipts/payments), iZettle for card payments. These donā€™t integrate via API.

PAYE tools for monthly payroll. And excel for VAT reconciliations.

Main pain is multiple logins and places to see how much cash is in the bank. Would be nice to have an API that shows then all in one login. Also if Monzo offered card payments at a reasonable fee versus izettle who charge a fixed % on the amount taken (which includes the VAT being charged in the fee %). Accounting is not an issue as I quickfike is easy to use and most things automatically download into it.

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

As above. Quickfile is very good. Does what I need and provides management reports. I also use excel to budget/reconcile.

  1. What do you like / dislike about your current business bank account?
    Santander is my main account where I receive receipts. Can pay in cheques. Delayed texts advise when money is in plus I receive nominal interest on the balance. Tide is used for DDs and card payments out. They are not FSCS so I only keep what gets spent.

  2. 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?

Ideally being able to take card payments from the client (face to face or online link), receiving interest on any balance, separate pots for tax payments so its not spent, FX or separate FX accounts would be nice so everything is inhouse.

124

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

Sole director of a limited company (app developer, contractor).

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

Managing tax money (Pots would be awesome, ideally with some interest). Would prefer to keep using Freeagent for the accountancy stuff + Monzo business for the actual money stuff.

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

Lloyds Business Banking (not too terrible) + Starling Business (I like the Forex rates, get billed in US dollars for a lot of software services) and export data to Freeagent by hand - Starling have been very tardy in releasing a direct Freeagent integration.

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

Not the best app (Lloyds Business isnā€™t even as updated as Lloyds Consumer, no TouchId, etc) and of course no real-time notifications of money moving. Getting 5k overdraft from Lloyds was a pretty sane process and relatively easy, whereas Starling rejected me outright even with a history of a healthy monthly turnover (this + no freeagent integration has stopped me from crossing over to them outright, now that Monzo are in the game I will probably abandon Starling entirely).

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?

Pots for VAT + Corp Tax, low/no fees for turnover <250k, good international payments, real-time notifs, Freeagent integration, and also importantly Ā£5/10K overdraft with reasonable charges for times when you want to let loose :wink:

125

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

Iā€™m a contractor; project management mostly for digital agencies - this is done under a limited company

2. What are the big pain points in managing your business finances? (think about things like invoices, expenses, payroll, taxes, etc.):
Currently using Tide business account. Itā€™s mostly OK, however invoice generation system is pretty poor and customer service can take a while to respond. The current account transfer time can also be lengthy depending on time of day.

3. What tools do you currently use to manage your business finances?
I employ a 3rd-party and I manually send them copies of invoices and manually notify them when funds hit my account. To try and streamline this Iā€™ve set up reminders to get in touch.
Aside from this, actual tool/system names are Yourcompanyportal (IMSā€™ own platform), Tide banking app.

4. What do you like / dislike about your current business bank account?
Likes
Tide has a simple, clean interface and is fairly simple to use.
It has 2FA for new payees and requires single authentication for any single transactions.
Can create custom categories

Dislikes
Transaction times vary fairly significantly. This is both for payments to arrive and leave the account.
Transaction fees; donā€™t affect me significantly but if I have to increase the number of transactions across this account, this will become an issue.

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?
Being ā€˜smartā€™ enough to know who I am; i.e. it understands that the user is also the person with the personal current account being paid. Having this link would make tracing payments/transactions between the accounts/being paid to HMRC or other payees much easier if not everything comes from the business account (including things like business expenses). On this vein, having pots to store tax and the various fees to be paid to HMRC would be nice as opposed to a single balance (stealing this one from the post above).

Failing that, itā€™d be nice just to manage everything from a single bank using a single, decent app.

126
  1. What do you do? Are you a sole proprietor, contractor, limited company?

Software development, limited company.

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

Lack of facility to take payments online through bank. Need to use PayPal or similar with high fees.

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

Excel spreadsheet

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

Account is free but has poor Web and mobile app capabilities.

  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?

Decent mobile app, instant notifications, ability to take payments online for no/low fee.

127

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

Director of a limited company, which has one other Director. Contractor in Financial Services, Banks, Investment companies & Insurance

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

Online banking is cumbersome, no app. Taxes needing to be submitted electronically means I need a change of some sort by end March this year. Invoices and expenses are ok, though need better software to capture copies of the vouchers

3. What tools do you currently use to manage your business finances?
HSBC online banking, Amex credit card, accounts done offline and sent to tax folks to check and submit, along with payroll returns

4. What do you like / dislike about your current business bank account?
Dislikes - No app, online banking needs a token, which I donā€™t always like to take with me when travelling or on holiday. No instant notifications, faceless when looking for support. Fees despite the account holding tens of thousands as an average balance.

Likes - It does work, though slow and reactive

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?

Single Director authorisation for payments, decent single payment limit, circa Ā£20k, must have integration with an accounting package for VAT submissions electronically, Xero is whatā€™s mostly being pushed. Pots for taxes could be useful, interest on savings, clean simple app, perhaps with the option to limit features for certain users (partner was nearly caught by an HMRC scam recently).
International payments and receipts could be useful for a side project. Links with Estonian E-Residency

Oh, and a far better service switching direct debits, as my current account switch to you was a disaster

128

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

Recently (November) set up a limited company with just myself as employee and director, having previously been a sole trader.

The focus of the business is digitalisation of business processes and helping them to better manage, process, and visualise data. Things such as automation of admin heavy tasks, BI data visualisation, and a key focus on automating reporting that happens daily/weekly/monthly/annually.

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

I set up an account with HSBC for the business shortly after set up, they recently changed their app which has made it slightly easier to use now that it has touch ID on my phone. That being said, it isnā€™t a very intuitive app and is pretty clunky, with not a great range of actions possible.

I use an Amex Card for most of my spending and then record it on Free Agent, and their app is considerably better to use and track that spending, I wouldnā€™t really want to use the HSBC app for tracking spending for the points made above.

My pain points are primarily due to access of account information and to process payments from my bank account - something not done very well by HSBC.

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

At the moment I am using:

  • Free Agent
  • HSBC Banking App
  • Amex Card & App

Being the single employee/director of the company has meant that the general things like payroll and expenses are all pretty easy. I use Free Agent to track all of my expenses and to do payroll - have no issues with this at all.

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

Like:

  • Simplicity to set it up, though potentially because I did have a personal account with HSBC in addition to my Monzo Account
  • I know there is good customer support whenever I need it - branches
  • Credit Card application was done and approved within 30 minutes after I hadnā€™t initially submitted it with my original request

Dislike:

  • Up until the new App update it was a bit tedious to log on using the digital secure key
  • The app is very basic and doesnā€™t enable you to carry out many actions
  • No push notifications when I spend or send a payment/salary
  • Difficult to have bank feeds to Free Agent

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?

  • Integration with accounting packages for bank feed reconciliation and expense matching - would also be useful for invoicing I would imagine
  • Tracking of future tax costs or fees
  • Pots for taxes or other known future costs
  • Instant notifications of spending
  • Potential integration with other card providers such as Amex for ā€˜secondary trackingā€™ of spending - though I imagine this would be difficult. Just to read only from another app so you can budget based on spending with other cards or banks.
129

Hi Jordan,

Here are a couple of ideas for business banking that came to mind.

Iā€™m an entertainer working as a sole trader: https://nickstein.co.uk

  1. I love the pots of the current account and would love those to be in he business account too

  2. A dedicated tax pot that automatically takes a predeterminded percentage of any income payments

  3. Invoicing with payment links to take payment with from clients.

  4. Being able to email receipts that automatically get recognised as expenses (1tap is a great app for this but it would be great to have it all under one roof)

  5. Accepting payments from abroad

  6. The option to charge/set up a direct debit with clients.

  7. The option to transfer from pot to pot (this would also be great for current accounts. For example moving money into the rent and bills pot and then moving any left over money straight to savings rather than having to withdraw it and then add it to another pot)

130

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

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

  • Tools like Xero & FreeAgent do a good job of the accounting processes. Key would be good integration with those.
  1. What tools do you currently use to manage your business finances?
  • FreeAgent
  1. What do you like / dislike about your current business bank account?

  • I donā€™t like anything about my business bank account. But there are many things I dislike with a passion:

  • Non-functional: for ethical reasons I donā€™t want to be a customer of the high street banks because of their exploitative business models and lending practices.

  • Secondly business banking seems crazily and unnecessarily expensive, with made-up charges, ā€œmaintenance feesā€ and more.

  • And finally the available tools and processes: bureaucratic account opening processes; dated apps; archaic statement and balancing processes; no real-time updates; offshore call centres; having to phone up and stay on hold for ages just to change my address - only for them to still get it wrong(:rage:); restrictive business banking service hours; and in some banksā€™ cases, still an insistence on sending paper via snail mail no matter how many times you ask them that youā€™d prefer digital comms only.

  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?
  • In addition to the real-time, friendly, app-driven features of the Monzo personal account, maybe provide a decent and affordable card/online/(crypto?) payment solution that integrates directly?
131

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

Limited company (A Fish and Chip Shop)

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

Current business internet bank provides the clunkiest of interfaces for a bulk payment. Wish it supported uploading a batch file, that canā€™t be hard!

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

Spreadsheets (+ bridging software for MTD VAT) and internet banking.

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

Fees for paying in cash. The nature of my business means that a bulk of the turnover is cash. The fee to pay in cash always feels unfair and too high. I continually have to switch business bank accounts to jump to a deal with a better (introductory) cash rate. I just want to be charged a flat low fair rate for disposing of cash.

I like that my current BCA allows cash deposits and change giving through the Post Office network.

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?

The lowest cash deposit rate.

1 Like
132

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

Bookkeeping practise registered as a sole trader.

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

Makings sure I keep enough money set by to make tax payments in Jan and Jul - so a pot with a date and target amount would be ideal with a simple graph to show Iā€™m keeping it on taget.

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

Xero and ReceiptBank

4. What do you like / dislike about your current business bank account?
I like that it has bank feeds for Xero, I dislike it isnā€™t associated with my personal bank account, canā€™t just switch between them.

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?

Bank feeds with Xero or other online accounting software is a must these days. The holy grail for business banking would be full payment integration with accounts software ( Xero, QuickBooks etc) So you can pay a bill in the accounts software and for the payment to go through to the banking app ready to be authorised without having to key in numbers again or download and upload csv files for bulk payments

133

Iā€™d like to be able to export what I need.

E.g when reconciling with Crunch I need to have the data formatted like so: date,reference,in/out,balance

Being able to do this easily without manual steps would be great.

2 Likes
134

Integration with Freeagent. Ability to photograph a receipt in the Monzo app and categorise the expense, which gets automatically uploaded to Freeagent bank feed feature.

135

Lots of good replies here already, but hereā€™s mine:

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

  2. What are the big pain points in managing your business finances? (think about things like invoices, expenses, payroll, taxes, etc.)
    Collating all the data into accounting software ready for reporting and analysis has always been my biggest problem. Iā€™d also like to use just one thing for invoicing, keeping track of payments, accepting payments etc. ideally, and if everything was able to support that so everything was in sync, that would be amazing.

  3. What tools do you currently use to manage your business finances?
    Starling Bank account, combined with QuickFile website for accounting, invoices, VAT returns, etc.

  4. What do you like / dislike about your current business bank account?
    Well, itā€™s not Monzo. So I dislike that mostly. I also had to go through quite a few emails over the space of two months, as the Starling support team did not seem to understand what my business concept was all the way through, and kept requesting the same documents that I could not provide to them.

  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?
    Iā€™d love everything under one roof. Invoicing, payments, accounting, reporting, analysis, and VAT-return through MTD to HMRC (pie in the sky dreaming, I know, however an all-in-one solution would be amazing, if it worked well!)

1 Like
136
  • What do you do?
  • Marketing consultant. Limited company.
  • What are the big pain points
  • Understanding cash flow with specific regard to tax liabilities. Eg, making sure I have enough put aside for VAT and corporation taxes
  • What tools do you currently use to manage your business finances?
  • Google docs for invoice creation. Google sheets for tracking income, payment etc.
  • What do you like / dislike about your current business bank account?
  • I canā€™t organise or separate my money.
  • If you could request one key feature
  • I would LOVE to have ā€œpotsā€ as on the Monzo regular app. I would label them ā€œVAT provisionā€, ā€œCorporation tax provisionā€ etc.
2 Likes
137

For all those mentioning Xero, Freeagent etc, would you need Xero if your business bank account offered similar facilities?

138

Hi @kennygrant.

Iā€™m not really interested in swapping freeagent for Monzo because first, I like freeagent, secondly and most importantly my accountancy firm I use makes me and all their clients use it, so they wouldnā€™t switch to Monzo. They have their own business after all.

That means no matter how good the services Monzo offer for accounting, I canā€™t use them unless I switch accountant or do my accountancy myself.

I imagine Iā€™m not the only contractor with a limited company in this situation.

Iā€™m probably ruling myself out of the trials by saying this but just want a business bank account that I can use Google pay with (so I donā€™t have to carry a card with me all the time) and can send my transactions to freeagent for reconciliation and to make my accountant happy. My Barclays business account does freeagent but doesnā€™t work with Google pay :-1:

PS: Iā€™d be happy to pay the Ā£5 a month just for that.

Kind regards
Richard

1 Like
139

Obviously not, but I donā€™t think itā€™s a good use of Monzoā€™s time to try to reimplement a full accounting package like Xero with a chart of accounts, general ledger, asset and inventory management, payroll system, and reporting system. (Did I miss anything out? Probably! And Xero isnā€™t the most fully-featured accounting system out there.)

Changing accounting system is a major pain. Weā€™ve only done it once so far when we switched from gnucash to Xero; weā€™re in no rush to do it again! Weā€™re reasonably happy with the way that Xero works, and now we just want a bank account that will let us make the most of Xeroā€™s features.

Examples of things we currently canā€™t do with our Xero+Barclays setup that we would like to be able to do with Xero+Monzo:

  • Create a batch payment file in Xero and upload it to Monzo to pay multiple people at once. Would make the 60+ payments we need to send for a payroll run a lot easier!

  • Issue debit cards to staff so they can spend from our current account, with different daily limits set per card. (Barclays set the limits per account, not per card, so we need a separate account per staff member which is fiddly and expensive.)

If Monzo could do those, and feed transactions to Xero the same way Barclays do, theyā€™d be 90% of the way to being the perfect business current account for us.

4 Likes
140

I suspect because there are many different businesses out there (some with very simple needs, some with complex needs), the accounting requirements vary dramatically as well. For example if you have large payroll, invoices coming in/going out multiple times a day or inventory to manage then youā€™ll start to use all the features of Xero and your bank is probably never going to replace that.

Many small businesses probably use very few of those features though and only use Xero/Freeagent etc because their accountant requires it, and in those cases Xero etc could perhaps just be replaced by the bank account with proper business expensing. Coconut is an interesting attempt at doing this (set up by accountants), and I think indicates an interesting direction for Monzo to explore, but theyā€™ll probably need to try integrating with the most popular accounting software as well as they canā€™t replace it for all customers.

141

@kennygrant: I donā€™t understand your logic because I wouldnā€™t have thought it matters how big or small your company is, the accountant isnā€™t going to change their way of working to suit us. They require us to reconcile our transactions in whichever system they require you to use. In my case FreeAgent.

142

Big fan of Monzo, invested, have a current account and Joint account, for me the main thing from a business account is:

  • Live transaction information
  • No fees for foreign transactions
  • planning around salary payments
  • a separate business focused app.

Looking forward to hearing more.