If you’ve ever been in charge of financial planning or tracking a shared group expense, you know how complicated, confusing, and sometimes downright chaotic it can be.
Whether you’re planning a birthday party or a road trip with friends, simple note-taking apps aren’t enough. Splitwise takes a more organized approach, streamlining the entire experience and making it really easy to know who owes whom and how much.
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A simple group expense tracker for the gang.
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How many groups of friends have you known who fell apart after a group vacation ruined relationships? I’ve seen it happen time and time again, and I’ve had quite a few first-hand encounters myself. When I was in my early 20s, I was often tasked with creating the trip itinerary and creating a budget for everyone. There would almost always be just one person who would be unhappy with the accounts or would say that the expenses did not match their version of the accounts.
Shared responsibility, accountability and transparency prevent any type of arguments or doubts from taking root. That’s exactly why I love Splitwise so much. It leaves no room for error, everyone involved can edit and access accounts at any time, and it’s on iOS and Android So there is no compatibility problem either.
Splitwise allows you to create a group for each expense in the group and you can also tag them accordingly. Even people who are not in the app can be added to a group via email or phone number. Each person in the group can see who paid each expense, and an automatic tally tells everyone how much they owe or how much they owe and who needs to pay whom to settle the score.
You don’t really need to upgrade to the paid version of the app.
The application has a paid “pro” version, but the basic “core” version is more than enough to manage shared expenses. These are the main features included in the free version of the app:
- Add groups and friends
- Divided expenses, record debts
- Equal or unequal divisions
- Divide by % or shares
- Calculate total balances
- Simplify debts
- Recurring expenses
- Offline mode
- Cloud Sync
- Expense Totals
- Categorize expenses
- 7+ languages
- More than 100 coins
- Payment integrations
As you can see, the app offers granular control over each transaction. Not only can you choose the currency, attach images, set the date, or add notes for each expense presented in the app, but you can also greatly customize how each expense is broken down. You can even create a recurring expense.
Whether you want to share one or more expenses equally, unequally, by portions, by percentages, or by adjustments, it’s all possible within the Splitwise app.
Thanks to the app’s “debt simplification” system, it doesn’t matter who paid what or how each bill was divided. The app does the complex calculations for you based on how much each person contributed and how each expense will be shared.
A single pool can have multiple currencies and no one has to worry about conversions because Splitwise does that for you too. This is incredibly useful for international travel. Unfortunately, conversion is a pro feature, although you can still record expenses in several different currencies in a group in the free version of the app.
Frequent international travelers benefit the most from the pro version
The pricing structure of the app is not that bad and you can get a one-month free trial to see if Splitwise Pro is worth it. It’s worth paying $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year considering the host of premium features it unlocks, including unlimited spending, currency conversions, and more.
Here is a complete list of premium features:
- Unlimited spending
- Transaction import
- Currency conversion
- Receipt scanning
- Breakdown
- Charts and graphs
- expense search
- Save default splits
- A completely ad-free experience
- Early access to new features
So far, I haven’t felt the need to purchase Splitwise Pro. Whether on a weekend trip to Jakarta with friends, going to the movies with my siblings, or planning a date night with my partner, the free basic Splitwise has been sufficient for my needs so far.
Since the number of daily expenses is limited to just five at the moment, I don’t think the day is far off when I’ll have to upgrade. However, before investing in Splitwise Pro, I suggest looking into free alternatives, as that is exactly what I plan to do when the time comes.
You never know what hidden gem of an app you might find. I may be late to the Splitwise party, but I can recommend some free alternatives that I’ve heard good things about. Look for apps like AiMoola, Settle accounts, MemoGoand Chinese if you like the idea of Splitwise but not the paywall. While I haven’t tried these apps yet, the features are similar and some of them are also completely free to use.
And if you’d like me to try any of these or other group expense tracking apps, let me know in the comments below.
