The other day a mate and I went for dinner. I payed the entire bill using my Monzo card. My mate gave me cash for his half of the bill. The transaction was marked as “Eating Out” as expected. I added a note mentioning that I’d received some cash to pay for half of it.
I’d like to split the transaction so my “Eating Out” spending is realistic as technically I didn’t pay the whole bill.
What do you think?
I can see this being common use case.
If that was a possibility in the future it would surely only work if someone actually paid money into your monzo account, not just gave you cash.
Issue is which I think the OP is referring to is if cash is given it affects target spending still
He should demand that his friends only ever pay via monzo.me.
Thanks for sharing, @anon5628595. Absolutely, my target spending is out. You’ve inspired a further idea.
Perhaps there’s an opportunity to manually adjust a transaction. I imagine editing a transaction to reduce how much was spent. The spending view could show “actual” and “adjusted” spend.
I’m a fan of keeping things simple and this might introduce an unnecessary layer of complexity.
Great idea, @seahorsejockey! I wish I’d done that.
It’s interesting in this context: the end of a dinner. It would’ve felt a little awkward to say. “Would you mind putting away your cash and paying me via this website?”. I feel there’s some friction in doing so.
At any given opportunity I tend to promote Monzo – I’m a big fan – but there are some contexts where I won’t. I think this is an interesting challenge for the Monzo team and I welcome their thoughts.
Yes, I have recently done that when requesting money from my friends for monaco F1 tickets. They could have easily sent me the money by instant bank transfer to my normal account but I made them do it via monzo.me. I agree it is a bit odd paying a friend through a website. With the introduction of proper accounts in the coming months that particular issue won’t apply.
Yep totally agree; there’s something unnecessarily awkward about this sort of situation.
For those who are not yet familiar with Monzo, sending money to friends via a Monzo.me link may not fill them with confidence! Off the back of this feedback, we’ve considered how we can make the messaging in the link a little bit more informative and secure feeling.
In terms of your original suggestion we’re still figuring out a smart way to do this which would ensure you would still always have an accurate overview of your budget and monthly spending (things could get a bit confusing in certain use cases). Hugo has elaborated on some of the considerations we have to make when thinking about how users can make manual entries and changes.
Thanks for your reply, @anon38211169. I really appreciate it!
It’s good to hear Monzo are exploring ways to improve the share-ability of Monzo.me.
Here’s an idea to mitigate some of the risks associated with ensuring an accurate overview of your budget and monthly spending:
*”.*Cash received: £x”It might help.
Could always have option to make a transaction split and ‘paid in cash’
We understand the concern of adding things manually and being allowed to modify amounts but we are suggesting these are done in relation to targets only. We understand that anything in the banking core of the app (especially the record of transactions) will need to remain fixed and non-modifiable, we should however be able to modify these transactions’ contributions to our targets, else they will not really be accurate and workable.
I have previously proposed that just adding one data field on the record information might be an extremely helpful solution that would not mess up the important banking flow of the app. Which is also basically what other people are suggesting here. I’m OK with not being able to manually add imaginary/virtual transactions and also not being able to modify the core important data of a transaction.
I use Splitwise for this, although I agree it would be great to include it in the Monzo app.
Here’s one of Monzo’s designer’s thoughts on that idea -
Frankly I’d be concerned that your solution would cause quite a few customer support issues, with users forgetting / mistyping the adjustment that they indirectly made to total spend, then wondering why there’s a discrepancy between that figure & the sum of their transactions.
But I totally get the use case & I’m sure that Monzo can figure out a solution, if they change their mind about this.
+1 for splitwise - a lot to learn from them, they have a really great app that lets you do some quite complicated bill splitting…
also, moneydashboard allow this sort of editing of transactions - I’m not sure if that’s a pro or con to this idea though! 
[This may be off-base, because I’m still waiting for my card and so haven’t played with the app yet, but…]
Isn’t the main requirement here to be able to specify a “cashback” element to a transaction, so that it can partly count against the relevant category, and partly as a cash withdrawal? That could be used both for cashback in shops, but also for scenarios where friends are giving you cash towards a transaction.
+1 to ‘Issue is which I think the OP is referring to is if cash is given it affects target spending still’
When I split a bill via monzo.me on Android prepaid it throws the full amount into my spending, which completely throws off my total for the month. Is this supposed to be solved?
Because of this when I’m splitting a bill I always prefer the other people to pay if they are not using the Spending section, and myself to send money to them.
I’d love a way to modify a entry in spending to reduce/increase the total for a category.
Agree with a few people here. The spending tab on android seems kind of pointless if it doesn’t take into account money’s coming in from split bills. Eg tonight it says I spent £44 on eating out but my friend sent me half that for his part of the bill. Since I can add an eating out tag to these incoming transactions surely it should be straightforward to include them in the aggregate eating out category - just sum up all the eating out things, some will be positive and some will be negative and you’ll end up with them correct representation of your spending. Or am I missing something?
Thinking back to trying to use moneydashboard, you could split a transaction up and then assign the two new transactions to different categories
I think you’re right. It also needs to pull transactions from elsewhere to be meaningful. For example, I pay for all domestic transactions on my Amex, but get money back from friends using Monzo.me. This means if the categories were credited with Monzo.me payments, mine would end up in minus spend, unless Monzo could bring in the Amex transactions.