I use cashback credit cards for most of my purchases with payment in full each month. Since the direct debit amount changes quite a lot from month to month, and it’s paying off all sorts of different types of cost (holidays, food, transport, beer etc), I use my pots to cover the cost according to what the subtotal come to. While it’s great to now be able to pay bills from pots (which I also use), it’d be even better to be able to take different amounts from different pots for upcoming direct debits once it comes into the Monzo feed. A bit like the salary sorter for putting money into pots for a given transfer into my account, but for outgoing bills.
I seriously doubt Monzo will be able to make this happen, but if you’re using multiple credit cards can you not simply dedicate one for food, one for transport etc, and that way keep them separate from each other?
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Ah, I don’t mean paying off multiple bills from multiple pots at once - rather paying off a single bill from multiple pots, and doing this for each credit card bill. One bill from multiple pots should be pretty straightforward I’d have thought.
Okay.
Let’s say you have 3 pots with £100, £200 and £300 in, and your next Amex bill comes in for £200. I’m guessing you’re proposing that Monzo alert you that a direct debit for £200 is due (as they know in advance by a day or two), so now they have to build a system to both alert you – because you need to choose how to distribute – and allow you to perform this distribution on the upcoming debit between the three pots allocated to that specific direct debit.
But what if you don’t see the alert or forget to assign the pots, what do Monzo do? Distribute evenly (£66.66 from each)? Start with the pot with the most in? Just take from the main balance (which is empty so it bounces)? Then what if you have twenty direct debits coming in tomorrow because you love credit cards and love to spend (and must be rich), and ALL of them are assigned to multiple pots? Do you have to do each in turn? Amex then Tesco then Barclaycard then Capital One then…
There’s bound to be someone who would do this, so Monzo would have to accommodate it. As you see, it gets complicated very quickly. And all to satisfy quite a niche (imo) requirement.
I’m not saying it’s not possible, or that they shouldn’t, I just think its a solution for something that isn’t a problem.
I think you’re over complicating it - we already have visibility of upcoming direct debits. A push notification isn’t necessary, although it’d be handy in the same way the other push notifications are.
Yes, it would require a screen and back end to process, but much of the script would be adaptable from the salary sorter and existing pay from pots script.
I envisage a long press on the upcoming DD in fees to trigger a salary sorter type screen to divvy it up on a one time only basis, then for the pot withdrawals to process when the DD clears as per the existing pay from pots tool.
As such, any DD with no pot allocation would process as per normal from main balance and any DDs with pots holding insufficient funds at the point of transaction would also come from main balance as any other normal debit transaction would. Equally, any multiple DDs on same day would just process in turn as per normal. IE providing it’s a one time sort (again, like salary sorter), you don’t need to factor any of the complexities you describe in the design.
Bills from Pots was supposed to make budgeting easier. Your system sounds like a complete nightmare.
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It does for predictable expenditure, but not when you use credit cards as debit cards!