Here are a few things that would make it easy for me as an IT contractor to use a Monzo business account.
Rules
The ability to automatically process inbound transactions and split money off into pots. When I get a payment from a certain customer or for a certain amount (over £10,000 for example) to be able to take 1/6th of it and put it into my VAT pot and another 20% into my corporation tax pot would be great and save me doing it manually.
Receipt attachment
Monzo personal already has this so I hope it carries over - the ability to attach notes and receipts to transactions so I can keep all my expenses information in one place.
Client tags
To be able to create client or project specific tags so I can attach them to expense transactions and report on them would be just great.
Accountant reports
My accountant takes pdf copies of my bank statements and then does my accounts from there. Obviously they need to know if I have VAT receipts for expenses and also sometimes some notes on the transactions explaining what they are - having this information attached to the transactions in the app is great but it would be even better if I could generate monthly or quarterly reports and send them straight to my accountant.
So I have my Monzo Business account and have just connected it to Xero so that transactions can be imported directly to my accountant - that’s point 4 mostly covered. I am still a little unconvinced by the way Monzo treats pots in statements - I can’t seem to get a statement for a pot and I can’t seem to get a statement that ignores pots.
To my mind a pot should be one thing or the other:
A) A virtual thing that only exists in Monzo and is ignored by statements so transactions in and out of pots do not show up and the balance shown is across the whole account including all the pots.
B) Treated like separate accounts so you can get a statement for each pot for the life of the pot.
Personally I prefer option A but at the moment it seems like they are being treated like a black hole so money goes out of the main account into a pot and is invisible from a statement point of view until it returns from the pot.
I see receipt attachment is there - this is great, but still no client tags - this would be really useful for most small business owners. I also note that rules are there in a basic form by being able to create a tax pot but this is a fairly blunt tool if you want to create pots based on specific budgets that cover more than one pot.
The weird way Monzo treats pots it actual reason I didn’t fully switch my business account to Monzo. There was some workaround for it to handle them in Xero, but would be nice to get proper support and treat pots like bank accounts.
BTW, Corporation tax is 19% on Profits. Taking 20% from everything seems bit overkill, specially if you pay yourself salary and have some expenses…