Youâve got a point about monzo.me requiring the card details repeatedly, but I fail to see how you can do a similar feature (sending a link for payment) that gives your account details to someone so they can do a bank transfer. It would need to be in a format thatâs understandable by their bank, and I donât think that exists.
âŚand although people might not feel this way, paying by card is probably safer for all involved. Youâre not sending out your bank details (Jeremy Clarkson discovered this wasnât a good idea when he published his in a newspaper column), and theyâre only giving details out that theyâd give to any shop.
Great feature, but like others I want to be able to generate payment links for non Monzo users. I will in the meantime try to convince everyone I know to join MonzoâŚ
I agree I donât think there is a way to configure a link which would remember bank details and it would obviously introduce some security concerns. I think the point is that Monzo.Me doesnât really serve the purpose of integrating non-Monzo bank accounts into the spend tracking.
What Iâd be looking for is more app based. Something where I can split a ÂŁ20 transaction in two and then have the app know that the next payment from âJohn Smithâ of ÂŁ10 or more relates to that transaction. People arenât always ready to pay you back when youâre ready for it and a system shouldnât require a payment from a link.
You canât and I donât think it does exist but thatâs not the point. The person paying me only cares about how easy it is for them to transfer me the money, they donât care about how it affects my banking.
In the case of me sorting fees for my 5 a side team, I pay the full fee online and then request payment from the players. I was requesting this via a monzo.me link every week, which wasnât working because the players couldnât be bothered to enter their card details every time just to pay a fiver, theyâd either bring a fiver to the match (which meant I struggled to keep track of who had paid) or paid in 2 or 3 week lump sums every few weeks, leaving me out of pocket. When I shared my bank account details in the Whatsapp group (to people I trust), it made things so much easier in that they could log in to their banking app and just process the same payment as they had previously without entering anything.
But the real issue which none of it solves which is making budgeting more accurate. All Iâm left with at the end of it is a payment of ÂŁ25 that canât be offset by the 4 ÂŁ5 payments being received, or I toggle to remove it from summary meaning ÂŁ5 I have spent for the game isnât included in my budgeting. Neither options are helpful to me. This is the problem that Monzo need to solve. I have a number of group payments that give me the same issue, impacting my monthly budget.
âSure, having the reimbursement linked to the original expense is nice, but itâs not worth breaking the facility for.â
I would completely disagree with this statement. Monzo have gone a long way to helping people manage their money and budgeting within the app but this is one of the things that causes budgeting issues and has done for a long time now without a solution, especially for larger payments. Their aim must surely be to make budgeting as accurate as possible and to give the account holder as many tools as possible to achieve this, using automation where at all possible, but also manual tools where automation is not possible.
I suspect Monzo havenât been able to figure out an automated solution to bill splitting for non-monzo users and so are weighing up a manual tool to set incoming bank transfers against previous transactions, something I very much hope they go through with (if they canât find an automated solution).
Loving this feature! You could see how this bill splitting could be reversed so when your salary gets paid in, you can attach direct debits and standing orders (rent bills etc) to it to that you only see your actual disposable income. You wonât even need to think about it after setting it up.
In the past, Monzo have accepted that theyâve rushed a feature out of Labs a little too quickly.
Given that and the issues discussed in this thread, I wonder if they could take a position early on how splitting to non-Monzo users may affect when this particular feature leaves Labs?
Ideally I think weâd want non-Monzo splitting to be a feature before it leaves Labs, Iâm sure. But what if itâs not possible? Would Monzo be able to announce ahead of time and as clearly as possible, if thatâs the route theyâd take? The potential for people to complain about splitting the bill being broken if they donât is clearly there, given there are users who have been advised to opt of of the labs option again because of it.
In my opinion they are two different features, it just needs to be labelled so.
This is bill splitting for âMonzo to Monzo paymentsâ but unfortunately this wasnât made clear at the outset, hence the expectations that bill splitting for payments from non-monzo users would be solved too.
The only use people have for Monzo.me is for non Monzo users as Monzo users can just send the amount required from within their app. This is from the August update:
'At the moment you can split the bill by sharing Monzo.me links with your friends. But in the next few weeks weâll make it even easier, and let you split the bill with people from the app!
When people pay you back for a particular purchase, weâll also reflect that in your Summary, so it doesnât look like youâve spent more than you have.â
To me, the above suggests we were going to get a non-Monzo user improvement!
I think people would be perfectly happy for this to leave labs as a Monzo to Monzo version with the Non-Monzo user version following at some point, or would have been if the Bill Splitting improvements in the August update had been advertised as the Monzo to Monzo version.
Although when I say perfectly happy, that would be forgetting the fact that the Non-Monzo user issue has now been around for nearly 2 years, has caused thousands of users a big headache and hasnât been solved yet / a timeline for itâs implementation hasnât been given yet. This issue has been discussed at length for a while now.
It would be nice to hear Monzoâs views on Non-Monzo bill splitting following the discussion in this thread. i.e whether this is something they expect to try and solve, what the options they are weighing.
See the reason, I think, they havenât a lot of real world use of Monzo.Me is because of the reasons highlighted in this thread; its just inconvenient, and cumbersome compared with the ânormâ of bank transfers. Therefore I donât see it an alternative with receiving money form a non-Monzo bank account.
Thatâs good to hear. Hopefully itâll match with the relative ease of bank transfers otherwise itâll be a task to convince non-Monzo users to use it.
Thanks for the repost, but I hadnât missed this myself. My question was specifically relating to the feature leaving labs. To rephrase it slightly:
Will the feature leave Labs when v1 is considered a-ok, or will there be a v2 iteration featuring non-Monzo users tried and tested before leaving labs?
To restate, itâs all well and good to say v1 is in Labs and users for whom it doesnât work can opt out of Labs again. But once itâs rolled out from Labs, thereâs no opt-out.
It was in response to this below (I should have quoted).
After having many a discussion on what it means to be in âlabsâ recently, my guess (and itâs only a guess), is that the main functionality of bill splitting wonât change between now and when it leaves labs.
There has been a lot of discussion on this very point over the past 2 days.
Yeah I missed the last bit, although in response to robinbâs post I would say that this issue has been on their radar for nearly 2 years, everyone knows that itâs an issue and affected targets in the first iteration of budgeting and now summary and this has been known for along time and has been discussed at length in these forums.
The old functionality of Monzo.me as they rightly say isnât really that valuable in this instance as it doesnât offset payments against transactions. Nice to see it has been done from Monzo to Monzo, a step forward, however my frustrations lay in the fact that there was expectation that Monzo had fixed the non-Monzo user issue (from what they were saying in their blog posts) which affects 80% of my budgeting issues vs say 20% for Monzo to Monzo (and this ratio isnât likely to change much in the near future).
Just didnât manage my expectations very well thatâs all
@ejs Iâd be interested to know what you mean by the targets issue! If you get a monzo.me payment, it counts against your spending in Summary if youâve categorised it (with anything other than âGeneralâ). Although the incoming payment doesnât offset against a particular transaction, it does remedy your budget/target and âleft to spendâ. I realise this isnât really related to bill splitting per se, but could you elaborate on the problem youâre having?
I had a similar problem with food, doing the shopping upfront for 4 people and then splitting it messing up my budget. I got a staring account and put x amount in to pay for the first shop. I now just use that to pay for the food and send myself the equivalent of a staring.me keeping my monzo budget in check.
Not ideal obviously but solves the problem while monzo build out all these features. Be easier to keep track of whoâs paid you back too with a clean transaction feed.
I think the issue, if his experience is the same as mine, is that the algorithm takes into account the initial large transaction and figures your âspending too fastâ. When the payments come back in it fixed the amount you have left in the budget but the algorithm still thinks your blowing your cash too quick.
Itâs more noticeable with things bought for someone else but you get the full purchase amount back. My dial gives me a different spending prediction if I keep the purchase in summary as if I hide it from summary. Even though I have got that money back and the same amount of money âleft to spendâ.
Targets was the initial iteration of budgeting tools on IOS. So the targets issue Iâm talking about is the same problem that people are having with summary i.e when you went out for dinner and spent ÂŁ40 and it was automatically categorised as âeating outâ, it would all count against the eating out target for that month. Iâm not sure you could receive money at this point on the pre-paid card but it still affected your monthly budgeting.
Perhaps Iâm using Summary differently to others but I have set a specific budget, summary isnât set up to show what is left in my account and therefore doesnât balance which I think is what youâre describing. Basically Iâve got several automatic transfers into pots including savings (monthly set asides for the annual car insurance, holidays etc at the start of my pay period). I then know exactly how much is coming out for bills and the rest Iâve set the budget for, splitting them up into how much Iâd like to spend in each category. So an amount for entertainment, eating out, transport, groceries etc. So the way Iâm using it is similar to the first iteration of targets effectively.
So I still have the issue of having to pick the option of a) paying a bill (of say ÂŁ50) which goes against eating out and then not being able to set anything against it or b) paying the bill and removing it from summary (but now being able to set your portion against the eating out category.
Effectively the option at the moment is for all of the payment or none of the payment to be included in summary, if you have set a specific budget for the month.
Let me know if Iâm doing things wrong though and thereâa better way!
The problem with Monzo.me is itâs great but you cant allocate the funds to payment youâve made so you still have ÂŁ80 in eating out, which you canât allocate the ÂŁ60 youâve had back giving you a ÂŁ20 net to your eating out target ď¸
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