Group payments: A better way to ‘split the bill’

I recently visited Rwanda with a group of friends, and between the five of us, tracking expenses in three currencies had the potential to get complicated. We paid in Rands whenever we used our South African bank cards, and cash payments were either in US dollars or Rwandan francs.

Enter Splitwise

Months before our departure, I set up a travel group on Splitwise – an app that tracks bills and other shared expenses. I recorded deposits made and flights that were paid in advance before the other travellers joined. It was only natural to carry on recording our expenses during the trip, as it was sometimes more convenient for one person to pay, versus five separate transactions.

Now, you don’t need to be an international traveller to use Splitwise. If you belong to a supper club or carpool, or regularly plan local trips with friends, live in a house share, etc., you should download the app immediately.

Even though some of us on the trip had been using Splitwise for years, we still marvelled at how convenient it was throughout our trip – even with multiple currencies adding additional complexity.

How it works

Splitwise automatically splits the bills, removing any stress associated with trying to mentally keep track of your balances with each other. The basic version is free and can be used on Android, iOS, or the web. The premium version is R39 a month or R399 per year.

Its core free features include the ability to create groups, record debts, make equal or unequal splits, suggested repayments, and recurring expenses. It also categorises expenses and has a nifty ‘simplify debts’ feature, which I’ll get into in a bit.

Other expected features are cloud sync, offline mode, exporting to CSV, its ability to support over 100 currencies, and availability in more than seven languages.

The premium version offers an ad-free experience, currency conversion, receipt scanning, itemisation, charts and graphs, expense search and saved default splits. You will also get access to any new features first.

Features that simplify life

Splitwise is very thorough with features you may not even know you want. You can even include a person with their splits before they download the app. Simply add them via an email address or mobile number, and they can access it at their convenience.

The transparency of the app adds to the experience, as every interaction by each group member appears on the group like a feed in reverse chronological order. So after you’ve added expenses and splits accordingly, as each person settles, it’s visible to all. If an expense was added between four out of five individuals, it will tell you “You were not involved”.

The ‘simplify debts’ feature restructures the debt without changing the total amount owed, but rather minimises the total number of payments. So, if person A owes person B R100, and person B owes person C R100, it simply tells A to pay C the R100 directly. We found this rather nifty, but you must go into the settings to enable it.

Splitwise is an invaluable app that removes any guesswork and complications for friends and family who hang out together often with shared expenses. It works brilliantly, and with its simple user interface, I wouldn’t even consider trying other apps in its category.

Technology is an ever increasing part of our lives and let’s be honest, many of us like gadgets. There is also an abundance of new online services and apps taking over the traditional services we use. Nafisa Akabor has been covering everything tech for well over a decade and she’ll be writing on how we can do tech within a budget and reviewing some of the new online services. Cache This is published on the last Tuesday of every month.