Labs Feedback: Bill Splitting 📝

[Feathers (MikeF)]

“Making noise” hasn’t historically achieved anything here (except annoying people) but I guess you could try

Given that one big list has ended and they seem to be in an interim ‘fixing things’ phase, there’s hope that the current labs project should get some attention.

[OBK (Oscar)]

Joint account bill splitting idea:

When bill splitting from a joint account (ie. a transaction paid with joint account), it would be good if you could choose to have 2 shares for ‘you’ and then 1 share for everyone else.

For example, if I buy 4 tickets on the joint account for £40, 2 of those tickets belong to me and my partner and 2 are for friends. So if I split the bill with my 2 other friends, I want to split it 4 ways, not 3 ways, ie. we pay £20, they pay £10 each.

Just a thought

[nathanthomson8 (Nathan)]

With the new bill splitting in labs its possible to enter the exact amount each person owes is it not?

At least it is for me on iOS

[OBK (Oscar)]

Yes, it’s possible to enter the exact amount. But this means having to calulate separately how much each person owes.

Okay, in my example it’s not very difficult to work out how much each person owes, but if the amount was £179.67 and there were 7 people splitting the bill, it would be good if it automatically could do this for me.

Currently it automatically splits it equally between everyone, but it would be good if it would split it equally while including 2 shares for the joint account since there are two people.

[awjdean]

If Monzo had an inbuilt calculator like Bunq then you could do all your calculations from the bill splitting screen, which would solve your issue and be really useful in a load of other situations.

[ASKendrew (Adam K.)]

I’m currently on holiday with my other half, and we are using my card for all the spending.

I can’t help but think it would benefit from a ‘holiday mode’ where I can flag all transactions to be automatically split, and the corresponding payment from my other half contained in the transaction instead of this…

For reference, we would have used our JA but without the ability to create Pots yet, she wasn’t comfortable in bringing the card abroad.

[anon48391895]

I’ve noticed that once I’ve accepted a payment request (and gone through the Touch ID / pin prompt) I’m returned to the payment request screen that still has an option to accept the request even though it’s marked as paid just above the button.

I’ve also noted that once I’ve been prompted for Touch ID when accepting a request I’m then asked to enter my pin, even though the Touch ID auth was successful. Pressing the Touch ID icon in the top right of the pin entry screen puts me back around this loop.

[greezles (Alan Greasley)]

Tried this feature on Friday - app crashed ️

[G13nnL (Glenn Lewis)]

Used this on Saturday. Was with a couple of mates who are both on Monzo. Ordered some stuff at the bar, went in to the transaction on my app, split it with them, they got the notification straightaway and processed it. Brilliant.

Side note. I do usually get the rounds in, but I wanted to try bill splitting!

[JPL]

Although I agree with some comments below (that it would be good to connect with non-monzo account holders) when I have used it, I have liked it.

With modern tap payments thought, I wonder how likely I am to use this feature in comparison to just asking the merchant to simply split the bills and pay separately. I suppose its good when you’re in a rush or when I am out and decide to buy a gift for a friend and want to split the cost.

I can see bigger potential for a holiday or group event and I need to split the cost of tickets or group travel OR for a small business.

[dc.robertshaw (Daniel)]

+1 for doing multiple at once. Me and my friend just used this on holiday and it was absolutely amazing. A future feature to accept multiple at once would be great. We were going through transactions every couple of days and ending up with 20+ all at once.

A feed item to ‘manage outstanding requests’ or something similar when you have 4 or more outstanding requests would be a nice solution? It could take you to a page with all outstanding requests showing grouped by who you owe them to and an ‘accept all’ button available on each group?

[Cranberry]

@Rika

I wasn’t expecting to see the best girl wallpaper in a Monzo presentation

I was somewhat wondering when making the slides earlier today if I should crop down to just the notification. I’m now very glad I didn’t!

Am I the only one not seeing what they’re talking about?

[gatehousejohn (John)]

Switched the feature on in labs and had no issues in iOS at all.

Been using for bill splitting even for our weekly shopping and things we buy for the house

[FirstRulez (David I)]

@robinb

Adding non-monzo users to the new bill splitting UI is definitely something on our radar, but it adds a level of complexity we didn’t want to get into for v1. Additionally, we just haven’t seen much real-world use of monzo.me in general. All this meant we decided to focus on making bill splitting work really well for those on Monzo.

I think unfortunately this is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I have not used Monzo.me much because it is so clunky. I have several friends using Monzo (yes I encourage people to move from PayPal, etc. to Monzo) but it is very counter-intuitive to have to send them an SMS or WhatsApp message to request money, especially when the app can see my firends are Monzo users to send money.

When I saw the presentation video about dealing with splitting bills in 3 sections I got really excited because I hoped that the existing “request money” would be updated as part of this, with the “split bills” part being updated separately.

For me the lack of use of Monzo.me requests is due to the clunky nature rather than the lack of demand.

[cookywook (Richard Cook)]

Hey all, little update today. We’ve heard that you need a way to split the bill with non-Monzo users too, so we’re working on adding this. Here are the latest designs, let us know what you think!

You’ll see that you’re able to copy the request link (ie. monzo.me) for the other contacts, and all the maths still adds up nicely

[BristolMatt (Matt C)]

Looks great!

Talking about the maths - I did have an issue of the bill not splitting correctly where the pence was an odd number (i.e. £18.35) and the split wouldn’t assign the extra penny to either person. Not a huge problem but for the sake of making sure the maths are correct it should probably assign that penny to someone.

[Rat_au_van (Em)]

Can you add a name for friend 3 and 4 to keep better track of who has paid you?

[Kumnaa]

Any news on when this will be on Android or are you working out the process on iOS before getting the Androiders to finish their work off?

[swok1080]

Looks good but I have some questions/suggestions:

• Since the preference would be to get people onto Monzo maybe there should be 2 add buttons, one for contact in Monzo and one for other which would mean one less click per person if everyone’s on Monzo
• If you split different amounts with non-Monzo contacts how do you get each URL?
• Are the Monzo.me links some way unique so that the correct non-monzo contact shows as paid?

Looks good though and as always appreciate the reaction to feedback.

[nexusmaniac (Marcus, Backend Engineer 🛠️)]

It’s definitely in the works…

But it’s not ready yet Getting there slowly but surely Keep an eye out on the Monzo Dev Slack (#Android) - We normally tear the APK apart and poke around a bit 2.14.0 had some work done to the bill splitting but it leads to a blank page (for now) new Beta might be here today/tomorrow so keep your eyes peeled for news!