The awkward part of travelling with friends often starts after everyone gets home. Someone paid for the hotel, someone else covered dinner, another person handled the petrol, and suddenly nobody remembers who owes what.
If you have ever had to scroll through a week of WhatsApp messages to work out who paid for which meal, an expense-splitting app can save you the trouble. Splitwise lets you record each expense as you go, assign who paid and who should share the cost, then keeps track of everyone’s balance.
It is also useful outside holidays. You can use it with housemates for rent and utilities, with family members for shared expenses, or with a partner when you regularly take turns paying for things.
Add Expenses Before You Forget Them
The easiest way to make any expense tracker useless is to tell yourself you’ll update it later.
With Splitwise, you can create a group for your trip and add expenses as they happen. Enter the amount, select who paid and choose who should split the bill. You can divide it equally, or use specific amounts, percentages or shares when everyone is paying differently.
Say four friends spend a weekend in Penang.
Ares pays RM400 for the hotel. Bia pays RM180 for dinner. Cronos pays RM100 for petrol. Demeter pays RM45 for snacks.
Instead of doing the maths at the end, everyone records their own expenses in the app. Splitwise then works out each person’s balance.
You can also leave people out of individual expenses. If only two people went for a particular meal, they do not need to split that bill with the other two.
For something small like a single lunch, you can also record it as a non-group expense rather than creating a group for it.
It Gets More Useful When Everyone Pays For Different Things
The appeal becomes clearer when the spending gets messy.
Imagine one person pays RM600 for accommodation, another pays RM250 for the rental car and two others keep picking up meals. One person joins the trip late, while another skips certain activities.
You could work it all out manually. You could also spend 20 minutes arguing with a calculator, which is less fun than it sounds.
Splitwise lets you specify who should be included in each expense, so not every bill has to be divided equally. It can also simplify the final settlement. If several people owe money to one another, the app can calculate a smaller set of payments rather than having everyone transfer money in every possible direction.
You Still Have To Transfer The Money Yourself
Splitwise records the debt. It does not magically collect it.
If the app says you owe your friend RM75, you still need to transfer RM75 through your bank or another payment method. Once you have paid, you can mark the balance as settled in Splitwise.
This is also why the app is better thought of as a shared ledger than a payment app.
Some users prefer taking turns paying rather than having one person cover everything. You can keep recording each payment throughout the trip and settle the final balance later. That approach also avoids having one friend effectively become the group’s bank.
You Can Use It For More Than Holidays
A group trip is probably the easiest use case, but you do not need to be travelling to make the app useful.
Housemates can keep track of groceries, utilities and shared household purchases. Couples can record recurring expenses without keeping separate notes. Families can use it for shared bills or costs during a holiday.
It supports multiple currencies too, which is useful if your group is travelling abroad. Splitwise says the app supports more than 100 currencies.
