Novo

Novo (like a lot of other business banks) has a feature called Reserves. Basically internal budgeting buckets inside your single checking account. You can create up to 20 of them and label them however you want: taxes, payroll, profit, expenses. But, and a huge but, unlike with other banks, it’s not actually separating your money.

All your money still lives in one account. So say you had $20K set aside for taxes, but then got a sudden bill that charged your main operating account $10K. Well, instead of bouncing and saying there are no funds, it would take the money from your Taxes reserve. That's not proper money management, with Mercury the money is actually separated so that can't happen.

With that, Novo's Reserves are more of a psychological sorting system than real financial separation.

Novo lets you set up simple rules to automatically move a percentage of incoming payments into different Reserves. Something like 25% to taxes, 10% to profit. It removes some of the mental math, which is nice.

But the rules are very basic. There's no logic like "if this Reserve balance falls below $10K, do a transfer". It lacks that level of control that other banks give you.

Novo lets you add vendors and pay them through ACH or checks, but the whole process is manual compared to other banks. Vendors can't submit their payment info through a link, and Novo doesn’t collect W-9s or tax docs on your behalf.

There are also no user permissions or approval workflows (e.g. get my approval for any payment over $10K) in Novo Bank so if you have a bookkeeper or anyone else you want to delegate your admin to, you don't have any guardrails.

The reality is, much better workflows exist in other banks which is why we say, if you plan on needing to pay anyone through your business bank, just skip Novo from the start. A lot of newer platforms automate this stuff, so using something this manual just feels like a step back.

Novo gives you the standard $250K in FDIC insurance, which is what you’d expect from most business banks. But heads up, for comparison, Mercury goes up to $5M through their sweep network of partner banks.

But this lines up with who Novo is built for. If you're only holding $5K–$100K, it probably doesn’t matter. But if you’re running a bigger business and holding more cash, consider a banking platform that provides stronger protection structures.

Novo has a built-in invoicing tool so you can create invoices and receive payments.

It's convenient in the sense that you don't need another tool just to send an invoice to a client, but it's quite mediocre. Compared to Mercury, the user experience of sending invoices is not even close 😅

Incoming domestic wires are free and outgoing domestic wires cost $30. International wires are handled through a Wise integration, which is generally good for exchange rates.

But the $30 outgoing fee is hard to justify when other platforms offer no-fee domestic and international USD wires. (hi, Mercury! 👋)

Novo can print and mail checks on your behalf, which is useful if you occasionally need to pay a vendor or landlord who only accepts paper checks. The limitation is that you can't attach documents or PDFs when the check goes out which is a huge pain (good luck, you'd need to find another solution).

This need doesn't come up often in our business (maybe 1-2 times a year), and having a business bank that actually handles all of this is super helpful. If you use Novo, you'd probably need to go to a Western Union or something 🫠

When using Novo I was constantly frustrated with their non-standard QuickBooks Online integration (it doesn't use the QBO bank feed, just synced over directly to chart of accounts, so all the smart auto-matching features of QBO no longer worked).