The polite way to be paid back

Asking someone you know for money is the most awkward transaction in finance. There is no invoice, no terms, no collections department — just you, deciding how many times you can bring it up before it costs you the relationship.

Why a message does not work

You send the number. They say sure, tonight. The message scrolls away. A week later you have to decide whether to raise it again, and that decision is the expensive part. Most people simply do not, and the money quietly becomes a gift.

The problem is not that they are dishonest. It is that a chat message has no state. It does not sit anywhere. It does not wait.

A request waits

A money request arrives as a notification carrying your name, the amount and the reason. It does not scroll away. It sits in their app as an open item, visible every time they open it, with a single approve button.

That changes the social arithmetic completely. You asked once. The reminding is done by the software, which has no feelings about it and never gets tired.

It cannot take anything

This is the part worth being precise about, because it is what makes the feature safe to use between people who are not family.

A request is an ask, never a debit. Nothing leaves the other person's account until they approve it with their own fingerprint or PIN. They can refuse it. Someone who sends you a request has gained no access to your money whatsoever — they have sent you a question.

Both sides see the same thing

You see what you sent and its status. They see what was asked and by whom. When it is approved, both statements carry the same reason you typed.

If you sent it by mistake, cancel it. A cancelled request cannot be approved afterwards, and both of you can see that it was cancelled and when. There is no version of events to disagree about.

Who this is really for

Landlords chasing rent from tenants they see every day. Tutors paid monthly by parents. Savings groups collecting a weekly contribution. Suppliers who deliver first and invoice after. Anyone whose relationship with the debtor survives the debt and therefore cannot afford a confrontation.

What it costs

Asking is free. The transfer that follows carries the ordinary rate for a transfer between accounts, shown to the payer before they approve.

What you can check

These are facts about the running platform, not adjectives. Each one is visible in the product, in the API reference or in the ledger.

• A request is never a debit: nothing moves until the other side approves it with their own credential.
• Both sides see the same record with the same status, so there is no argument about whether it was sent.
• A request can be cancelled by the person who sent it, and a cancelled request cannot be approved afterwards.
• The reason travels with the request and lands on both statements.

What it costs

Asking is free. The transfer that results carries the ordinary rate for a transfer between accounts, shown before approval.

Is it switched on?

Whether this is available depends on the authorisations in place and on what the administrator of a given deployment has switched on. That changes, and an article does not — so the live answer lives on the feature page, which reads it from the platform itself: Money requests on the features page.

Read next

• Payment links — Get paid by sending a message.
• BitriQR payments — One code on the wall. Every payer it can reach.