What are you looking for in a Web Portal?

:wave: Hello Monzo Community! :relaxed: Taking a look at our trello board - a Monzo Business Web Portal is one of the most requested features! We’d love to hear more!

What sort of features are you expecting in a web portal? What workflows you do in web versus phone, and why? If you use a web portal for your business banking today, how often do you use it? How could it be improved?

If you’re willing to walk us through how you use a web portal today, we’d be happy to organise a research session with you!

Being able to see balance and manipulate pots, aswell as full and live transaction history.

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When I’m making multiple payments at once/back to back I prefer to do it on my desktop version of online banking. It’s about the only thing I don’t use my phone for.

I just find that using a keyboard makes me more sure I’m going to be doing it all right, plus I can have spreadsheet open at the same time to copy from.

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I’ll skip over the more obvious ones, but these would be important to me from a business perspective:

  • Manage my payees with their account and personal details (easier to ensure I get it right on the big display)
  • Monzo Chat for when I need live support (again, easier with full keyboard and access to information)
  • View monthly/annual statements
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I would want the online portal to have absolute functional parity with the app.

When working, it’s nice to be able to just load up the business account for anything I need to do without having to use my phone. A lot of the time I need to check a transaction when I am actually on my phone which would make things awkward if a portal didn’t exist.

The main things I use it for though is;

1 - checking customers have paid (don’t always need to use the bank for this - if the accounting app is open I’ll use this)
2 - making payments to suppliers. It’s really useful to copy and paste account numbers on the PC to reduce human error.

I have never seen a well designed web portal. Good UX and fully responsive design is a must, but I’m pretty confident this would always be in your plan.

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While I think Monzo should have a web portal I can’t actually think of anything that it would be useful for.

I find paying staff easier through the existing Monzo app than through Metro Bank’s web portal. Maybe Monzo could make that easier but I’d rather Monzo pulled the payroll data straight through from Xero instead of making me retype it anyway.

If we had to manually pay an invoice (as we occasionally do) then it might be easier to avoid error on the big screen but again I’d rather Monzo just pulled the right data from Xero in the first place.

Yes, using a keyboard is easier for copying data over but the goal should be to avoid double typing stuff in the first place where possible.

I’d like to see this applied to personal accounts also, not just business.

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A web app you mean? It should do exactly what the mobile app does IMO.

What would I need it for? As a backup to the phone app in case the phone is lost or broken.

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I know you want to find out which features to prioritise when looking at this project…

But ultimately, every bit of ‘core’ banking functionality that’s included in the app should ideally be included in the web app. So everything that high street banks include on their respective online banking sites. That’s the whole reason why it’s very difficult to justify switching to Monzo Business at the moment.

For bells and whistles, it’d be good to have full integration with accounting providers like QuickFile, QuickBooks and Xero. And possibly some payment providers too? Cough…GoCardless (I’m sure Tom still has friends there that he can speak to to make that happen :wink: )

Oh and don’t release it before it’s got those ‘core’ banking features. Or at the very least make it abundantly clear to testers that it’s an MVP but set clear timelines on when additional functionality will be added and stick to them. We don’t want another Monzo Plus on our hands!

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We’ve heard a few people talk about giving bank access to their accountant. Is this something that any of you have done? Besides sharing your statements and transaction data, is there anything you’d expect your accountant to do for you in your bank account?

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Downloading the receipts for accountants.

But chat would be really useful.

My old accountant used to want me to send them statements so they could reconcile amounts on dates and perform brief auditing.

My new accountant doesn’t need this because they use FreeAgent and Xero and accept the bank feeds. If the feeds aren’t present then I think they also want to perform some checks on balances and particular transactions etc.

I’ve worked with several accountants; some of them don’t even want access to the accounting systems, just an export of various reports. I can’t imagine an accountant ever wanting to look through your bank account.

An auditor or a bookkeeper on the other hand… yes, I can see the benefit but again, the most use will be from the accounting systems with bank feeds.

I’d like to see the breakdown of spending by category each month on a web portal, like it does in the app, but all on one table so it can be compared over time. Perhaps with a nice graph too.

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To disable it on my account.

Desktop websites are inherently a lot less secure than a native app on a phone, due to all the security / sandboxing / encryption facilities that a phone provides.

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Even with Xero bank feeds, my accountant and auditor want to see actual bank statements.

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Thanks! How do they prefer to receive these? CSV? PDF? and over how many months?

Do they have access to your current bank account to view it themselves? or do they always have to ask you?

They need them quarterly, when doing VAT returns and EC Sales Reports (and then they have them already for annual corp tax returns). They want the pdf statements to provide more formal audit trail backup to the information in the bank feeds.

They don’t have access to my HSBC business account now, so they nag me (I always leave it too late) and then I have to download them and email them across. I have a business current account, savings account, and credit card accounts, so it’s a pain (that’s four statements for each month).

Having accountant read only access (so they can download the statements themselves) on the horizon is one of the reasons I’m moving to the Monzo business account.

My accountant is a Xero Platinum Partner, so they are fully into digital, but I really cant see them accessing my Monzo account (or hundreds of other clients) on their phones! So I think web access will be crucial for them.

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Thanks for the detailed response! Very helpful to understand why it’s such a pain for you today. We’re definitely working on read-only access, and working on a web version too!

I wonder if we could also make it a bit easier for them by automating the statement generation / emails to them on a regular basis :thinking: - that way they’d never have to nag you, and you wouldn’t have to set reminders to do it!

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Automating it sounds like a great idea. That’s the kind of thinking that makes a digital first bank like Monzo so attractive! :smiley:

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Hey!

LOVE Monzo so would love to move my business to it too.

I agree with others that the web portal should do everything the mobile version does.

These would be dealbreakers for me, on the web portal:

Download CSV files (with the option to select ‘download all transactions since the last download’). I like to manually upload them to FreeAgent myself, as FA doesn’t always guess the transactions correctly.

Bulk transactions. I wouldn’t trust myself to do this through the app. I like to have my bank window next to a spreadsheet so I can check and check again. Perfect for payday, bills etc.

One off and scheduled payments would also be a must on both web and mobile.

I love the idea of having the different pots where you can select how much to automatically move over. This would be fantastic for VAT and TAX savings. Also committed spending as there is in the personal accounts. Ability to monitor and amend these in the web portal would also be great.

I would primarily use the web portal for all my business banking activities. I usually only use my phone to look to see if it’s worth logging in or to quickly see if an invoice has been paid.

Thanks Monzo. Looking forward to it!

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