Adamya Sharma / Android Authority
Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets have been my traditional 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 making certain everybody contributes to including and updating knowledge. For a author who will not be a math genius by a far stretch, this definitely wasn’t the wisest method to go about managing vacation budgets. Add to that the awkwardness of repeatedly mentioning 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 problem 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.
Lots of you will have already heard about Splitwise or used the app, however I had by no means appeared 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 pals choosing up completely different actions, meals, and experiences, I felt the necessity for a greater method to observe all the pieces. I began out utilizing Excel, pondering it might assist me preserve issues organized. However let me be sincere: my spreadsheet abilities are fairly fundamental at greatest. As I attempted to enter the experiences I had already booked and paid for to calculate who owed me what, it turned clear to me that I used to be in over my head.
Do you utilize an expense splitting app whereas touring in a gaggle?
99 votes
Splitwise made all the pieces easy with its genius options. I can safely say it’s one of many greatest 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 making an attempt to navigate on my cellphone (and let’s simply say the cellular 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 robotically 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 need to awkwardly ask.
Furthermore, you’ll be able to add notes, photographs, and PDFs of bodily receipts when including an expense. The app auto-assigned icons to our bills primarily based on the sort, and I might additionally manually choose an icon of my selection. Whereas creating an expense entry, you’ll be able to specify if you wish to cut up an expense equally or in case you’ve paid for the entire thing and the way a lot the opposite folks 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 forex conversion. We have been in Dubai, and holding observe of the dirham in opposition to our dwelling forex 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
After all, 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 situation with utilizing Splitwise — and it is a main one — is that to get pleasure from all its options, it’s worthwhile to subscribe to Splitwise Professional, which prices $5/month, a tad costly in case you don’t use it incessantly. The free model of the app solely permits you to add three bills earlier than requiring you to see an advert. When you have a protracted listing of bills and don’t wish to cough up the money for a Professional account, you’ll need to put up with annoying wait instances whereas advertisements play out earlier than you’ll be able to add new entries.
Splitwise is one thing I can even use exterior of my travels.
I quickly realized that Splitwise is one thing I can even 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 an identical scenario, nevertheless it’s good to know I’ve the app ought to an identical use case come up.
I do know Splitwise doesn’t provide the identical degree of customization as Excel or Google Sheets, nevertheless it’s easy and makes budgeting for dummies a lot simpler. In actual fact, when you’ve created an expense listing, you’ll be able to export it as a spreadsheet. Due to the app, I might give attention to having fun with our journey moderately than sustaining spreadsheets, and by the tip of our Dubai journey, my pals and I have been grateful to have discovered an answer that simplified our monetary interactions, letting us absolutely get pleasure from our time collectively with out the burden of complicated calculations.
