I’ve recently been on the lookout for other Monzo style services for my savings, credit card, business banking, etc. I came across Tide which offers business banking through a mobile app, sign up in just 5 minutes and may work out cheaper in monthly charges for some.
I recently received a letter from Lloyds Bank saying that they’re changing my business bank account in September and increasing the monthly charge, so I’ve just opened a Tide account. I look forward to giving it a go and hopefully replacing Lloyds for my business banking.
From what I can tell Tide is in the early stages so there are a lot of features and things that you might need that are on the roadmap and coming soon. But it’s a fully operational bank account with a sort code and account number, you can make payments, setup direct debits, comes with a Mastercard, etc.
Thought I’d mention it for those who aren’t aware of it as I’ve seen a few posts asking for business accounts from Monzo. Anyway, nip over to tide.co if you fancy checking it out. Does anyone else here already use Tide?
Monzo and Tide have some main investors in common, and Tom has recommended them before for small businesses looking for an account.
For freelancers and contractors Coconut is another option, and for those who may be employed but wish to keep their business and personal expenses separate there is the Expend card.
Tide’s app was pretty awful the last time I tried it - I would bet good money it’s one of those Cordova/Phonegap apps that lazy developers use when they can’t be bothered to write the app in the native language of the platforms they’re targeting. The app was slow, the UI animations weren’t as smooth and it generally felt out of place on iOS. I hope they improve it in the future as personally I wouldn’t put too much trust in a company that can’t make a good app.
I’ve been using tide for quite a while. It’s great. However it’s cards still come up as prepay which is quite annoying if you use a bunch of SaaS like I do.
My company have used Tide for about a year now, but we’re moving away. It’s really not up to scratch.
Even things as simple as the balance matching the sum of the transactions: we reported this as a bug about 6 months ago, it was immediately confirmed as a known issue, and today it is still not fixed.
I can relate to that. My experience has been buggy to say the least. Which it to be expected in a start up. But if they’d made the faq or community pages better you could have found the answer without it becoming an issue. Having just looked the tide android app was last updated on 15 June.
So they are doing stuff just not big improvements.
I’m using Tide.co as well, but their lack of updates to their app is a bit worrying… I asked for a “quantity” feature for their invoicing template which would take a programmer an hour probably and nothing has been done for over a month… Seems like a logical feature to want to have on an invoicing template that should have been there to begin with.
Hey Richard, do you have any insight into when Coconut will be launching? Or how one would get early access. I’ve put my details in their email sub box and haven’t heard from them in weeks.
Unfortunately not. They seem to have gone quiet of late. Hopefully that means they are active behind the scenes. I will ask a connection though and see what he says.
Hey Wayne, I’m on the verge of signing up for Tide - is it still buggy and lacking updates? If yes, is it worth putting up with them to save a bit of time - or should I just use an expense/receipt tracking app alongside my regular bank account and send my clients invoices manually?
Updates are slow to non-existent it seems. I’ve stuck with them mainly because I have a low volume of transactions. Depends what functionality you need. I think expenses/receipt tracking may be fine…just upload as attachment to a transaction. Invoices you may need to assess if it meets your needs or use a different app.
I was thinking about tide but discounted it due to not having multiple users and supporting multiple organisations on a single app.
Then I tried to sign up for an RBS business account… First of all they ‘sent the wrong email out’ saying they’d call me when I was supposed to call them. So after 2 weeks I called up, then I got sent an email with about 15 randomly named PDFs to print off and sign and take to the branch (several miles away). Apparently after that I was supposed to schedule a half hour interview (and that after spending half an hour online filling in a broken form). I never got that far as I downloaded Tide and in 5 minutes I had an account!
The other comments are true, it’s almost certainly a phonegap/cordova app. Each page takes a few seconds to load with a big spinning square in the way. They are not getting everything right like Monzo is (building their own systems from the ground up, support, transparency, a diversity policy, thinking about mental health etc) but what they lack in features they make up for in what they don’t do. I.e. make you fill in thousands of forms, phone calls etc.
Prices are reasonable too. 20p transactions in/out.
