I’ve just had an idea, and was wondering if you folks could help me riff on it?
Problem
I’m often in a situation where I’m buying things for my friends, then they’re buying things for me, and at the end it all sort of adds up. Like when I’m out for dinner, at the pub etc. These scenarios usually start and finish at a clear point in time (e.g. when I leave work/when I get home). I think we can do better than making tonnes of p2p’s and Monzo.me’s.
Solution
If I could pop my Monzo app into a mode that meant all transactions were shared between a defined group of people until I turn the mode off, well, that’d be swish.
It could be a shared pot, that everyone puts £30 into. The money comes out as each of us make transactions, and when I leave the pub and toggle off “mates mode”, the remainder is divided and zaps back into each of our accounts
What do you think? Do you agree with the problem? How else could it be solved?
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Edit
Ok cool cool howsabout:
I create a pot called “mates”
My friends send me p2p’s with the reference “mates”. These instantly whiz through to my pot. Payees appear listed on the card icon for my “mates” pot.
All purchases for the night are made on my card, and go out of the “mates” pot as long as it exists.
At the end of the outing, I tap on the mates pot. The pot disappears, and the remaining balance is automatically split between me and my pals via outbound p2p’s.
We all get a feed item summing up the transactions for the outing.
All night all I have to do is create a pot and it at the end. All my friends have to do is p2p me once.
Ps. I’ve just taken a weeks holiday and am ridding myself of comms. Will try to respond to some feedback and ideas in a week or so. Excited to see what gets suggested!
Real-life scenario: recently on holiday with friends. We took it in turns to buy dinner etc, but not all transactions whilst away were shared. In this scenario, being able to flag some transactions within a certain time period (e.g. a week) as communal would be great (or alternatively to be able to flag some as not-shared, if we assume that most things are for sharing). And I really like the idea of shared pots for this - but operating slightly differently to your example. In this example, the shared pot is just a virtual view of who’s spent what on holiday stuff. This would become magical if Monzo could quickly tot up who owes who (with the ability to override because I bought those drinks in cash, say). So, we end mates mode, Monzo says I owe you £10, you owe Bob £12 - it’s three fingerprints to authorise then we’re all square.
Essentially, I’m wondering if there’s two use-cases here: one for a shared kitty (as you outline), and one for a retrospective ‘settle-up’ facility?
But sounds amazing. Let’s make one/both happen.
[Edit: I’m riffing in a slightly different direction and wondering if an MVP for shared pots might be the initial way to go… Flatmates, for example. I create a new pot, choose my flatmates (also on Monzo) to I share it with and away we go - household bills and expenses tracked. This might need some tweaking with categories (or the ability to add custom #hashtags so that the shared pot would know what to display), and some basic analytics (showing totals of who’s paid for what) - with maybe settling up done via Monzo.me…?]
@Naz you specified different user case, but I think requests for something like this had been flying around for quite some time.
Set up a pot for a goal. Or we can call it kitty.
Add some way to manage transactions related to the goal.
Add some way to split money after they are spent or allow reserving money before they are spent.
Goals: holidays, pub night, wedding gifts, gift for colleague leaving for new pastures, shared bills with flatmates.
Managing transactions:
Payment has to be done from one card for simplicity.
Payment needs to be tagged manually into ‘kitty’. I think it’s risky to enable kitty on a to/from basis, what if my Spotify subscription gets accidentally added to kitty?
Managing kitty:
One person needs to be the owner of the kitty, with invite rights etc. We can’t have it disappearing, one person has to be ‘responsible socially’ for it. There’s always this one person good with money
Owner of the kitty can invite others to join. Participants have to explicitly join.
I think it wouldn’t be too difficult, allow participant send a request to kitty owner to include transaction made on participant’s card. Owner would receive request and accept. Transaction would appear in kitty, but kitty, as good Excel spreadsheet would know that participant added to the balance, not the owner.
As transactions in kitty progress, owner of the kitty can press ‘Pay up’ button that sends summarised Monzo.me link. Pay up can be pressed multiple times, always zeroing balance for all participants. Money can’t be taken automatically, participant has to at least press ‘yes, pay up’. All people who are owed should receive money after this.
In order to deposit money ‘in’, owner of the kitty has another button ‘Request deposit’ (or something more friendly). Owner sets the amount and it triggers same action as ‘Pay up’, allowing participants to add to initial balance. Technically, money should be moved to kitty Owner’s account.
I’ve heard talk of goals before, but I think this is where language works against us. To me, a goal is an objective - in banking terms probably something like “I want to say £1200 this year”. I see progress towards that goal and know that, on average, I need to save £120 a month.
So, it seems that there might be three things that we should try not to confuse:
A goal: to put aside £x amount (and maybe spend it on something)
A kitty: a shared pot of money for a specific purpose (maybe v short term, like drinks)
Settling-up: flagging shared transactions which would be reconciled and split after the event
But… with hindsight, I worry that we’re thinking too much about this and over-engineering @Naz’s original idea. There’s something elegant in the simplicity of “mates mode” - with a simple toggle on and off…
Would one of the issues be visibility of the transactions? As they would only be seen by the ones making them rather than shared by all?
Great idea though and sound more akin to a shared pot.
What would be good is to go into a transaction and tag a pot. Then it just pulls the money in from the pot.
The. If you did have a shared pot you could turn on ‘auto tag’ to ‘event pot’ which is the one you are sharing with the others. And set a start and end time/date for auto tag.
Some ramblings in there but I think I got it across
Could use the API to display access to the pot and it’s transactions via a unique link. A Monzo.me link with a defined reference could then automatically put any monzo.me payments back into the ‘kitty’ and reference the payee against the kitty (marking that a person has paid thier share for a particular transaction). An API access token with read only access to the Pot that lasted say a month? would probably be adequate for it.
Would probably only take a few hours to draft something up with the current short lived tokens…
My friends send me p2p’s with the reference “mates”. These instantly whiz through to my pot. Payees appear listed on the card icon for my “mates” pot.
All purchases for the night are made on my card, and go out of the “mates” pot as long as it exists.
At the end of the outing, I tap on the mates pot. The pot disappears, and the remaining balance is automatically split between me and my pals via outbound p2p’s.
We all get a feed item summing up the transactions for the outing.
All night all I have to do is create a pot and it at the end. All my friends have to do is p2p me once.
Ps. I’ve just taken a weeks holiday and am ridding myself of comms. Will try to respond to some feedback and ideas in a week or so. Excited to see what gets suggested!
@HoddzDJ makes an important point, sometimes people will want to dip out, having perhaps gone a little too far…
Given you’re aware of who the split has been funded by, perhaps you could have a ‘members’ button on the pot, which lists every contributor, with a cross next to each person so that they can be removed and have their current share sent to them.
Now my brains thinking, maybe this page should also have the plus button which generates you a monzo.me link which already has some simple UID in the note. This UID should also be visible somewhere else on the pot, so people can contribute to the pot with that beautiful Monzo to Monzo ease🚀
It could be cool if a feed item appears once the ‘mates mode’ has ended, detailing all the transactions that were used and the individual breakdowns.
This would still give us visibility of the transactions then if we wanted to? It would also mean the initial amount we sent and then received back is all contained nicely in a feed item, rather than cluttering up the main feed with the initial amount, the refund and your share of the transactions?
Could we get a unique number for every pot created? Then you could automate incoming payments to go direct to a pot. You could try and automate from pot name but there is chance of getting the name wrong.
Love this idea. I visualise it as working a shared pot, but with Monzo having the ability to activate a pot as the main source of funds for a period of time, with all physical card payments being taken from this pot rather than the current account, with a fall back to the current account on overspend. This way potentially all of the group could set this as their “active pot” for the evening and pay out of the Garfield. **kitty
This is great idea and would compliment the Event Reports idea very well
The only problem I can foresee with the current solution spec is the fact that so many groups of mates will inevitably have at least ”that one friend” still stuck in medieval ages of legacy banking. I’m not that much of a cold-hearted b***tard that I’d tell them to pay their own way.
The solution here I think would be to allow them Monzo.me directly into the pot. At the end of the event whatever they’re owed would automatically be returned to them via faster payments. Although if they were to owe anything then we’d simply have to inform them and trust they’ll pay up.
I’ve just had an idea, and was wondering if you folks could help me riff on it?
on the mates pot. The pot disappears, and the remaining balance is automatically split between me and my pals via outbound p2p’s.
