If you’ve ever been in charge of financial planning or tracking for a shared group expense, you know just how messy, confusing, and sometimes, downright chaotic, it can get.
Whether it’s a birthday party you’re planning or a road trip with friends, simple note-taking apps don’t cut it. Splitwise takes a more organized approach, simplifying the entire experience and making it really easy to know who owes who, and how much.
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A straightforward group expense tracker for the gang
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How many friend groups have you known that fell apart after a group holiday soured relations? I have seen it happen time and time again, and have had quite a few firsthand encounters myself. In my early 20s, I would often be tasked with creating the trip itinerary and creating a budget for everyone. There would almost always be a single person who’d be unhappy with the accounts, or say that the expenses didn’t match their version of accounts.
Shared responsibility, accountability, and transparency prevent any kind of arguments or doubts from taking root. This is exactly why I love Splitwise so much. It leaves zero room for error, everyone involved can make edits to the accounts and access them any time, and it’s on iOS and Android so there’s no compatibility issue either.
Splitwise lets you create a group for every group expense, and you can label it accordingly too. Even people who aren’t on the app can be added to a group via email or phone number. Every person in the group can see who paid for each expense, and an automatic tally tells everyone how much they owe or are owed and who needs to pay whom to settle up.
You don’t really need to upgrade to the paid version of the app
The app has a paid “pro” version, but the basic “core” version is more than enough for the purpose of managing shared expenses. Here are the core features included with the free version of the app:
- Add groups and friends
- Split expenses, record debts
- Equal or unequal splits
- Split by % or shares
- Calculate total balances
- Simplify debts
- Recurring expenses
- Offline mode
- Cloud sync
- Spending totals
- Categorize expenses
- 7+ languages
- 100+ currencies
- Payment integrations
As you can tell, the app offers granular control over every transaction. Not only can you choose the currency, attach images, set the date, or add notes for each expense lodged in-app, but the way each expense is split can be highly customized too. You can even create a recurring expense.
Whether you want to share a single or multiple expenses equally, unequally, by shares, by percentages, or by adjustments, everything is possible within the Splitwise app.
Thanks to the “simplify debts” system employed by the app, it doesn’t matter who paid for what, and how each bill was split. The app does the complex math for you based on how much each person chipped in and how each expense is to be shared.
A single group could have multiple currencies, and no one has to scratch their head over conversions because Splitwise does that for you too! This is incredibly useful for international travel. Unfortunately, conversion is a pro feature, though you can still record expenses in several different currencies under one group in the free version of the app.
Frequent international travelers benefit from the pro version the most
The app’s pricing structure isn’t too bad, and you can get a free one month trial to see if Splitwise Pro is worth your while. Paying $4.99/month or $39.99/year is well worth it considering the wealth of premium features it unlocks, including unlimited expenses, currency conversions, and more.
Here’s a full list of the premium features:
- Unlimited expenses
- Transaction import
- Currency conversion
- Receipt scanning
- Itemization
- Charts and graphs
- Expense search
- Save default splits
- A totally 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, hitting the movies with my siblings, or planning date night with my partner, the free basic Splitwise has been sufficient for my needs so far.
Since the number of daily expenses it limited to just five right now, I don’t think the day where I will need to upgrade is far off though. However, before investing in Splitwise Pro, I suggest looking into free alternatives, as that’s exactly what I myself plan on doing when the time comes.
You never know what hidden gem of an app you might find. I might be late to the Splitwise party, but I can recommend a few free alternatives that I have heard good things about. Look into apps like AiMoola, Settle Up, MemoGo, and Cino if you like the idea of Splitwise but not the paywall. While I haven’t tried these apps yet, the functions are similar, and some of them are entirely free to use too.
And if you would like me to test drive any one of these or other group expense tracking apps, let me know in the comments below.
