In August, we introduced a new feature that lets you get paid one day early, for free. And thanks to our new-look app, today, we're following that up with two features that we hope will change how you bank with us. We know that lots of you like using Monzo to manage your spending and use another bank account to pay your bills. Up until now that’s been a smart move. Most of us like to separate our fun money from our rent and bills, either literally in different accounts, or by keeping track with written budgets. But today we're launching some features that we think offer an even better way to do this: neatly separate your spending, savings, and bills – but all under one roof.
Salary Sorter: all your money neatly separated, as soon as you get paid
When you get paid into Monzo, our new Salary Sorter gives you the option to divide up that incoming payment however you like. That might mean a chunk going into a Savings Pot, some into a Pot for bills (there’s more on new Bills Pots below), and the rest left in your main balance to spend. This works on personal and joint accounts!
So it’s really quick and easy to split up your regular income into whatever works best for you. And you know that even if you spend every penny in your main balance, you’ve still put what you need aside for bills and savings.
For this first iteration, we’ll remember your preferences the next time your salary comes in so you can just tap a button to do the same sort. In future, we’d like to make it so that same sorting happens automatically, if you want it to.
Also: we’ve called this Salary Sorter since we think that’s the main way people will use it. But you can use the Salary Sorter on any incoming payments over £100, whether that’s a student loan, or one-off payments from friends.
Bills Pots: don’t worry about accidentally spending the rent
You can now turn any Regular Pot (that’s any pot that you don’t earn interest on) into a Bills Pot. Here’s how it works:
1. Pick which bills you want to pay from the Pot from your list of scheduled payments. At the moment you can choose Direct Debits or standing orders, but unfortunately not subscriptions to things like Netflix and Spotify. (We’d love to include those in future though.)
2. Make sure you’ve got enough in the Pot to cover the bills which are due to come out of it that month. Salary Sorter should help with that!
3. When the bill’s due, we automatically move enough money from your Pot into your main account and then pay it for you. Easy.
Right now you have to manually top up your Pot to make sure you’ve got enough to cover your bills. If you don’t have enough in the Pot to cover a bill, we’ll take what we can from the Pot and then make up the difference from your main account.
If you don’t have enough there either, we’ll warn you the day before the bill is due so you’ve got enough time to add some money. (If there still isn’t enough when the bill is due, the bill will either take you into your overdraft – if you have one – or bounce, just as it would if you were paying it from your regular balance.)
One day we’d like to make the process of topping up your Bills Pots automatic, so you never have to worry about it at all.
We’d love to hear what you think! Let us know if Salary Sorter and Bills Pots help you out, and if not, what we can do to make managing your money easier with Monzo.