Adamya Sharma / Android Authority
Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets had been my ordinary go-to options for planning and splitting vacation bills with my family and friends. For years, I’ve struggled with sustaining sophisticated expense sheets, grappling with sophisticated formulation, and guaranteeing everybody contributes to including and updating information. For a author who is just not a math genius by a far stretch, this definitely wasn’t the wisest option to go about managing vacation budgets. Add to that the awkwardness of repeatedly declaring unpaid dues to folks. Evidently, I used to be dreading having to undergo the entire ordeal earlier than an all-girls journey to Dubai. Then I chanced upon an app that saved me each the psychological trouble of doing math and the embarrassment of asking folks to settle up — Splitwise.
The app is designed particularly for splitting bills, and it felt like a sport changer.
A lot of you will have already heard about Splitwise or used the app, however I had by no means regarded past the standard spreadsheet till that journey. As I ready for my journey, I shortly realized that managing bills for all eight of us could be a problem. With a number of mates choosing up completely different actions, meals, and experiences, I felt the necessity for a greater option to monitor every part. I began out utilizing Excel, pondering it might assist me hold issues organized. However let me be sincere: my spreadsheet abilities are fairly fundamental at finest. As I attempted to enter the experiences I had already booked and paid for to calculate who owed me what, it grew to become clear to me that I used to be in over my head.
Do you utilize an expense splitting app whereas touring in a gaggle?
13 votes
Splitwise made every part easy with its genius options. I can safely say it’s one of many finest apps I’ve ever used. It’s designed particularly for splitting bills, and it felt like a sport changer. In contrast to Excel or Sheets, which I used to be making an attempt to navigate on my telephone (and let’s simply say the cellular app is a nightmare), Splitwise is intuitive and user-friendly. I didn’t need to be tied to a desktop model of something; I wanted one thing I may simply entry on the go.
My favourite Splitwise options
As quickly as I began including bills in Splitwise, I appreciated the way it routinely calculated balances. No extra psychological math stress! I may merely create an inventory of individuals from my contacts and enter who paid for what, and the app did all of the heavy lifting. It additionally made settling up extremely simple; if somebody owed me cash, Splitwise would ship a reminder or provide the choice to ship one manually, so I didn’t should awkwardly ask.
Furthermore, you may add notes, pictures, and PDFs of bodily receipts when including an expense. The app auto-assigned icons to our bills primarily based on the sort, and I may additionally manually choose an icon of my selection. Whereas creating an expense entry, you may specify if you wish to break up an expense equally or for those who’ve paid for the entire thing and the way a lot the opposite folks in a gaggle owe you. Have a extra sophisticated break up? You get choices to divvy up an quantity in percentages.
One other spotlight was the automated foreign money conversion. We had been in Dubai, and preserving monitor of the dirham towards our residence foreign money may have been a headache, however Splitwise dealt with it seamlessly. This function alone saved me a lot time and psychological fatigue.
The draw back, due to course there’s one
In fact, Splitwise solely works if the folks you’re splitting bills with additionally obtain the app. In any other case, you’re again to sq. one, explaining the place the cash was spent and reminding folks to settle up.
One other problem with utilizing Splitwise — and it is a main one — is that to get pleasure from all its options, you might want to subscribe to Splitwise Professional, which prices $5/month, a tad costly for those who don’t use it incessantly. The free model of the app solely helps you to add three bills earlier than requiring you to see an advert. If in case you have an extended checklist of bills and don’t need to cough up the money for a Professional account, you’ll should put up with annoying wait instances whereas advertisements play out earlier than you may add new entries.
Splitwise is one thing I may use outdoors of my travels.
I quickly realized that Splitwise is one thing I may use outdoors of my travels. Once I introduced the app as much as my colleague, she informed me that her household makes use of it to separate month-to-month bills for an aged father or mother. There’s a function within the app that enables particularly for household expense sharing and time-based sharing. I don’t have the same scenario, nevertheless it’s good to know I’ve the app ought to the same use case come up.
I do know Splitwise doesn’t supply the identical degree of customization as Excel or Google Sheets, nevertheless it’s simple and makes budgeting for dummies a lot simpler. Actually, when you’ve created an expense checklist, you may export it as a spreadsheet. Because of the app, I may deal with having fun with our journey relatively than sustaining spreadsheets, and by the top of our Dubai journey, my mates and I had been grateful to have discovered an answer that simplified our monetary interactions, letting us totally get pleasure from our time collectively with out the burden of advanced calculations.