There are roughly five ways to collect money for a group gift in the UK in 2026. Three of them mostly don't work anymore. One of them works but creates a problem you don't want. One of them is what most offices have quietly settled on.
This guide goes through all five honestly — the cash envelope, the bank transfer thread, the PayPal request, the spreadsheet IOU, and the dedicated group gifting platform — so you can pick the one that matches your situation. Spoiler: if your team is bigger than four people, you almost certainly want option five.
The five methods, briefly
The cash envelope. Someone walks around the office with a card and a brown envelope. People put coins or notes in. At the end of the week the organiser counts it, withdraws the rest from a cashpoint themselves, and buys the gift.
The bank transfer thread. The organiser shares their account number on Slack or WhatsApp and asks people to send across whatever they want to contribute. They tally it manually as transfers come in.
The PayPal request. Same idea but using PayPal's send-money feature, or a money pool on a consumer payments app.
The spreadsheet IOU. A Google Sheet with everyone's name, what they've promised, and what they've actually paid. Someone has to chase the gaps.
The dedicated platform. A purpose-built group gifting tool — Hey Friday, Collection Pot, GoCollect and so on — where contributors pay through a shared link and the organiser doesn't touch anyone's bank details.
The differences between them are bigger than they look. Here's how they actually compare in practice.
Honest comparison
Method | Contributor effort | Organiser effort | Hybrid-friendly | Money safety | Hidden costs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Cash envelope | Low if they happen to have cash | High — counting, banking, chasing | No | Sits with one person | Miscounts, lost notes, awkwardness |
Bank transfer | Medium — needs sort code | High — manual tally and chase | Yes | In the organiser's personal account | None per contribution; mixes with own money |
PayPal request | Medium — needs a PayPal account | Medium | Yes | Held by PayPal | PayPal fees if Goods & Services is used by mistake |
Spreadsheet IOU | High — needs to remember to pay | Very high — eternal chasing | Sort of | Money sits in many accounts | Almost never fully collects |
Dedicated platform | Low — one tap with Apple Pay | Low — set up and forget | Yes | FCA-safeguarded on good platforms | Platform fee — varies wildly, read the small print |
Why the first four mostly don't work anymore
Three structural shifts since 2020 have made the older methods clunky.
Cash basically left the office. Pre-pandemic, most people carried at least a tenner in physical money. Now, fewer than one in three UK adults uses cash weekly. A brown envelope assumes everyone can rummage in a wallet for a fiver, which most people can't.
Hybrid working killed the in-person handover. If half the team is remote on any given day, the envelope only reaches half the team. Same for the card you pass round at lunchtime — the people who'd most want to sign it never see it.
Personal bank transfers stopped feeling appropriate for shared money. Sending £20 to "Tom in accounts" feels weirdly informal when Tom is a colleague rather than a friend. The mental friction adds up: did Tom get it, will Tom remember to add me to the list, am I going to get an awkward chase if I forget for a week.
The remaining hassle isn't the money. It's the admin. The cash envelope works fine for collecting £40 between four people who sit at the same desk row. It falls apart at twelve people, hybrid working, and anything north of £100.
When each method actually still makes sense
These aren't museum pieces. Each older method has a real use case left:
Cash envelope — small in-office team (under six people), low-stakes occasion (a birthday lunch contribution), short timeframe (a single afternoon).
Bank transfer — when contributors are family or close friends rather than colleagues, and you trust everyone to send without a chase.
PayPal money pool — increasingly limited; PayPal sunset its public group payment feature in many regions and the workaround (request money individually) is no better than a direct bank transfer.
Spreadsheet IOU — corporate environments that have to log every contribution against a project code or department budget. Real, but rare.
Dedicated platform — everything else.
The dedicated-platform option, in more detail
This is what most UK offices have settled on for collections of more than about £50, or with more than six contributors. The mechanics:
The organiser sets up a pot — title, optional target, closing date.
The platform gives them a shareable link.
They post the link in WhatsApp, Slack, or email.
Contributors tap the link, choose an amount, leave a message, pay with Apple Pay or card. Twenty seconds of effort.
The platform holds the money in a safeguarded account until the organiser closes the pot.
The organiser picks how the recipient gets the gift — a UK retailer gift card, a flexible Visa gift card, a bank transfer, or a specific present bought with the funds.
The whole thing is asynchronous. The organiser doesn't have to be online when people contribute, doesn't have to chase, doesn't have to count, doesn't have to handle anyone's card details, doesn't have to remember who paid.
What to compare when picking a platform
If you're choosing one for the first time, six things matter.
Fees and where they fall. Some platforms take a percentage of every contribution (you ask for £10, the recipient gets £9.20). Some charge the organiser when they withdraw. Some are nominally free but suggest contributors add a tip — which most contributors then quietly add because they don't want to look stingy. Read the small print and ask the platform's support team to walk you through every fee path before you commit.
Money safeguarding. UK group gifting platforms should be either an FCA-authorised Electronic Money Institution themselves, or operate as the agent of one. That means contributors' money is held in a ringfenced account separate from the platform's own funds. If the platform goes bust between you collecting £200 and withdrawing it, FCA-safeguarded funds aren't lost. Unauthorised platforms can't make that promise.
Apple Pay and Google Pay support. Wallet checkout converts dramatically better than card-detail entry. Platforms that haven't built proper wallet support typically see 30%+ lower contribution rates from the same shared link.
No mandatory account for contributors. If your colleagues have to create a login just to chip in £10, half of them will give up. Good platforms let contributors pay with a single tap.
A real card alongside the pot. The recipient's experience isn't a number — it's the messages everyone left. Platforms that treat the message wall as an afterthought lose the bit that makes the gift feel like a gift.
Redemption flexibility. Some platforms only let you give the recipient a specific gift card. The good ones let you choose between a gift card, a bank transfer, or buying a specific present with the funds.
Step-by-step: running a collection
Once you've picked a platform — Hey Friday or otherwise — the actual process looks like this.
Set the pot up the day you find out. The earlier you start, the more contributors you'll catch. A pot opened the morning of someone's leaving lunch will collect about a quarter of what the same pot opened a week earlier would.
Pick a target only if you're confident. A visible target is a double-edged thing: it anchors people upward if you'll definitely beat it, and downward if you'll fall short of it. If you're not certain, leave the target off. Open pots collect more reliably than half-full ones with a 60% bar.
Share the link in the channel that's already busy. WhatsApp, Slack, group email — wherever the team already lives. Don't create a new channel for it; you'll lose half your contributors.
Pin a starter message. Three lines: who the gift is for, how to contribute (with the link), when it closes. No long preamble. Your colleagues are skim-reading.
Send one reminder, halfway through. Not three. One. The morning after you open is too early; the day before closing is too late. Mid-collection is the sweet spot.
Close it on time. Don't extend deadlines. The pot collected what it collected; padding the date makes it feel like the team underdelivered.
Pick the right gift format. If the recipient's tastes are clear, a gift card to their go-to retailer. If you don't know them well, a flexible Visa gift card or a bank transfer. If the team has a specific present in mind, withdraw the funds and buy it.
Hand it over with the messages. The recipient should get the gift and the message wall together. The card is what they remember.
Practical questions
How much should I ask people to contribute? Don't suggest an amount. The norm in UK office collections sits somewhere between £5 and £15 per person; suggesting any specific number anchors people to that floor and you lose the people who would have gone higher. Leave the contribution amount open and most people self-sort within that band.
When should I close it? Three to seven days from opening, ideally aligned with the recipient's last day, birthday, or maternity start. Any longer and people forget; any shorter and you miss the people who only check Slack on Tuesdays.
What about people who weren't asked? Group collections are participation-based, not invitation-based. Share the link in a channel where everyone can see it; people contribute if they want to. Don't DM individuals — that's where it tips into pressure.
What if we don't hit the target? Either don't show one, or accept the result. Closing a pot below target and pretending it hit feels worse than just owning the actual amount.
Where does the money sit while collecting? On a properly safeguarded platform, in a ringfenced account at a UK bank. Not in the organiser's personal account, not mingled with the platform's working capital.
What about fees? This is where the category quietly differentiates. Some platforms charge a percentage of every contribution. Some are nominally free but lean heavily on contributor "tips". Hey Friday charges a flat, transparent fee with no tipping prompt — that's a deliberate choice; we wrote about why we did that.
Can I refund someone who wants to back out? Most platforms support partial or full refunds before the pot is closed. After it's closed it gets harder, because the funds have moved to the recipient or been spent on the gift.
Who keeps any leftover money? Depends on the platform. Some refund pro-rata, some round up to a higher gift card, some pass it to the recipient. Always check this answer before you start.
The single-sentence rule
If you're organising more than two collections a year, or your team is bigger than five people, or anyone working with you is hybrid or remote, use a dedicated platform.
If none of those apply, the cash envelope still works fine.
Where Hey Friday fits
We built Hey Friday because the existing options either felt designed for fundraisers (heavy, formal) or for one-off social moments (lightweight but missing the workplace bits). The thing UK offices actually need is somewhere between: properly safeguarded, frictionless to contribute to, and warm enough to feel like a gift rather than a financial transaction. Apple Pay and Google Pay built in, no contributor accounts, no tipping prompts, and a flat fee that's the same whether you collect £20 or £2,000. The recipient takes the gift as a UK retailer gift card, a flexible Visa gift card, or a bank transfer — their pick.
Setting up a collection takes about three minutes.
The thing nobody tells you about organising a group gift is that the bit that wears you down isn't the money. It's the chasing. Every method on this list except the last one makes you the chaser. The one that doesn't is the one you should pick.
Ready to organise one? Start a Hey Friday collection — set it up in three minutes, share a link, and never count cash again.
