Adamya Sharma / Android Authority
Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets have been my common go-to options for planning and splitting vacation bills with my family and friends. For years, I’ve struggled with sustaining difficult expense sheets, grappling with difficult formulation, and guaranteeing everybody contributes to including and updating knowledge. For a author who shouldn’t be 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 stating unpaid dues to individuals. For sure, 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 problem of doing math and the embarrassment of asking individuals 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 seemed past the standard spreadsheet till that journey. As I ready for my journey, I rapidly realized that managing bills for all eight of us can be a problem. With a number of pals selecting up completely different actions, meals, and experiences, I felt the necessity for a greater option to monitor every thing. I began out utilizing Excel, pondering it could assist me maintain issues organized. However let me be sincere: my spreadsheet abilities are fairly primary 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?
42 votes
Splitwise made every thing 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. Not like Excel or Sheets, which I used to be attempting to navigate on my cellphone (and let’s simply say the cell app is a nightmare), Splitwise is intuitive and user-friendly. I didn’t wish to be tied to a desktop model of something; I wanted one thing I might 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 might 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 straightforward; 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, photographs, and PDFs of bodily receipts when including an expense. The app auto-assigned icons to our bills primarily based on the kind, and I might additionally manually choose an icon of my selection. Whereas creating an expense entry, you may specify if you wish to cut up an expense equally or when you’ve paid for the entire thing and the way a lot the opposite individuals in a gaggle owe you. Have a extra difficult cut up? You get choices to divvy up an quantity in percentages.
One other spotlight was the automated foreign money conversion. We have been in Dubai, and retaining monitor of the dirham towards our residence foreign money might have been a headache, however Splitwise dealt with it seamlessly. This characteristic 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 individuals 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 individuals to settle up.
One other subject with utilizing Splitwise — and this can be a main one — is that to get pleasure from all its options, it is advisable subscribe to Splitwise Professional, which prices $5/month, a tad costly when you don’t use it ceaselessly. The free model of the app solely enables you to add three bills earlier than requiring you to see an advert. When you have an extended checklist of bills and don’t wish to cough up the money for a Professional account, you’ll should put up with annoying wait occasions whereas advertisements play out earlier than you may add new entries.
Splitwise is one thing I may use exterior of my travels.
I quickly realized that Splitwise is one thing I may use exterior of my travels. After 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 dad or mum. There’s a characteristic within the app that enables particularly for household expense sharing and time-based sharing. I don’t have the same state of affairs, but it surely’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, but it surely’s easy 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 might concentrate on having fun with our journey relatively than sustaining spreadsheets, and by the top of our Dubai journey, my pals and I have 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.
