Family/Couples' account
When I was using Billmonk a few years ago, my wife and I started out with separate accounts, but since we share finances, often times we'd be repaying debts for one another (since we have the same friends) and it got confusing. My solution was to just turn my account into "Joe&Jane Smith" and have all our expenses go through one account and removed her account completely.
I'm not sure the ideal implementation for this situation. Perhaps a "family account." Perhaps the ability to add multiple email addresses would work (but unlike a previous feature request, this application would be such that a family could share an account under different members' email addresses). Then if people tried to add the husband or wife as a friend via email address, it'd add the "family account" instead and work accordingly.
Daniel
shared this idea
Splitwise has some basic support for this now, depending on what you’re looking for. We now support multiple email addresses for a single account, so you can more easily share one account with multiple people.
However, we won’t automatically adjust how much you should owe as a “couple”. For example, if “Bob” adds an expense with “Sue and John’s Couple Account”, then the bill will be split 50/50 between those two Splitwise accounts. I can definitely see how it would be useful to automatically make Sue and John pay for 2 shares, but we’re unlikely to add that feature in the near future. For now, you can still work around this by manually using the “Split by shares” option when adding a bill, and assigning 2 shares to the relevant account.
60 comments
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Julie Nguyen
commented
It would be great if there was an option to add “family members” or “group members” in addition to just individuals. For example, you could add a contact with a phone number or email who would act as the “head of household” but also be able to add additional family members under the “head of household.” For example, we are currently planning a trip and want to split costs equally among 18 people. However, several of the attendees are young children who don’t have emails/phone numbers and wouldn’t even be responsible for settling up their bills. Instead of making dummy placeholders for all these children, it would be nice to be able to add “child accounts” under their parents’ account.
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Ryan strom
commented
A recent trip exposed what I suspect is a regular use case. My wife and I went on a trip with other couples and wanted to consolidate our debt together so that we were only paying between couples. We still wanted to be in as individuals though because sometimes only some people from each couple would be involved in specific activities (attracting shared costs unevenly). So when we went to settle up we wanted to be able to just consolidate the debt inside the couple so we would only have to settle up between couples. Suspect it could work within the debt simplification module....
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Joaquim Monteiro
commented
Very useful for couples in group transactions were one pays the others bills, but you still want to include both to even out the split total
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Saran Laoyookhong
commented
In many trip, I came across where there are couples and/or family members inside the group and are often counted as individual unit. I know there are some options like
http://feedback.splitwise.com/knowledgebase/articles/967453-tips-for-splitting-expenses-in-groups-with-couples
However, the ability to later combine persons into unit would allow the simplicity when entering each expense while keeping the post-trip settlement simple. -
Dan Jackson
commented
We're doing the same thing as Jaime, except for a shared bank account that we pay bills (like our mortgage) from. Being forced to create a "dummy" account was non-obvious & frustrating.
I'm stoked that there's enough flexibility to represent what we want to do: deposits to acct (from individual or from both of us) plus shared bills paid by the account or by an individual. However, the default settings are never right, and its tricky to get right every time.
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Jamie
commented
My partner and I have a shared credit card, and we often split purchases and use split wise to track how much we each owe the credit card.
Currently we have made an extra account and named it “credit card” we have to make the credit card the person we owe money to, and then manually split payments removing credit card as someone who splits the purchase.
It would be good to have a way to incorporate shared accounts without all these extra steps.
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Anonymous
commented
I am trying to separate the accounting for two people with the same email address. It appears easy to merge them but not to split them.
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Niklas Dey
commented
We often make holidays with a bigger group also containing couples, paying together at the end.
The Problem: meanwhile husband and wife pay things in Smaller groups: for example the wife with her girls during shopping and the husband with his men at the beach.
So both Need their name in the List. No shares needed so far. At the end it happens that the wife has to give money to heir husband?! Makes no sense.
-> function needed that combines both of their single accounts to a virtual wallet. Saying „couple A“ owes x€ to Y.
That would be Amazing.
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Anonymous
commented
Happy to use the workaround for the time being but it would be really useful to have a couples’ facility. It’s the first time I’ve used Splitwise (for a trip with 2 couples and 2 singles) and it’s the functionality I immmediately noticed as missing.
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Anonymous
commented
Ok... so having just been through this I found a work around
Easiest solution i can think of is run all members of the group as individual accounts during the trip but at the end you can effectively transfer the obligations of the dormant partner to the paying partner by adding an entry where the dormant partner makes a payment to paying partner for the total of all of their payments due to all members.
Can be done either as a payment or a bill entry as the dormant partner paying but the 'split between' name solely being the paying partner.
This leaves the dormant partner as settled and the paying partner now with the net obligations.
You will have to do this for each of any multicurrency balances to transfer each.
Do have 'simplify payments' switched in though.
That worked perfectly for me.
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Anonymous
commented
Easiest solution i can think of is run all members of the group as individual accounts during the trip but at the end have a merge function to combine family/couples into one settlement unit.
This allows for individuals being separately represented for drinks/ meals if not there as a couple but grouped for settlement.
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Sam Simic
commented
We are a group of 9 on holiday (3 couples, 2 singles and a baby). We all have a Splitwise account individually, but it would be great to be able to link accounts within couples to simplify settling up.
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Anil Goyat
commented
hii
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Anonymous
commented
There should be a setting when adding to a groups, when traveling with couples. The programming needs to associate two people in the group as one but still count them as two. Sounds confusing but when you travel with a couple you’ll understand. Seeing as they usually have combined finances. But still need to adjust numbers that they are 2 people when breaking down so it mathematically works out evenly.
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Richard S
commented
Looking for a solution here — many comments & ideas offered in comments.
I’ll re-read for best current work-around.
Upcoming trip with 10 people; 4 couple & two singles. Each couple has one Splitwise user and so does each single. So, 6 accounts.
Looking to Splitwise for clear-to-follow solution or for easiest method w Splitwise as now designed.
Would really like guidance here, not needing to figure it out & explain it to 10 people, some of whom aren’t going to want complex methods.
Please??
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Bruno
commented
When we have a big group, and there are couples within the group that share the same expense, it would be great to join their account balance, so that it would be possible to trqck their expenses and balances.
For example, we are a group of 9 travelling around Indonesia, however sometimes I pay somethings and my wife also pays for others expenses, and it would be great to get that debt join in one account, but still having it divided by two people, because the expenses payed within the group need to be splitted by 9.
Thanks for your attention.
Kind regards
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Renzo
commented
+3
We have a group of 6 people which all have all an account. But as a group we split costs per couple. It is a hassle or impossible to manage this... I really like this option. -
Akshay
commented
Let me start with how awesome Splitwise is!
It would even great if Splitwise has a concept of Partner Account!
Me and my wife have a lot of common group expenses. Everytime they have to add some shared expense they either have to add both of us to the bill or split expense by share and add '2 shares' to one of us.
It would be easier to know about collective debts. Example if me and my wife both owe some money to the same friend, it could be helpful to view it our collective debt without constantly switching between accounts.
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Drew Levitt
commented
I'm trying to settle up with a bunch of friends, some of whom are in partnered couples and some of whom aren't. In order to correctly split shared expenses, it's important to represent each of us as individuals, but if some people are operating as a household with unified finances, it would be good for debts to consider the couple as a shared entity.
For example, I paid for a bunch of stuff on a recent trip and my partner did not. So I am owed money but she "owes" money. In reality, she should not owe money so long as I am owed more than she "owes" - her "debt" should pass through me.
I can think of a couple of ways Splitwise could handle this:
1. For each member of a group, include a field indicating how many "shares" that member has. So one member could represent me and my partner together, with two shares, and another member could represent my single friend, with one share.
2. Somehow enable users to specify which friends are part of their household. -
Anonymous
commented
Yes I want what you owe as a "couple". the problem with combining the people is there are situations where both people of a couple aren't part of an individual expense. Lets say for example on a group trip the wife goes to get drinks with the group but the husband is not there. I still want the flexibility to say who was part of each expense at the individual level I just wan the settlement to get grouped by "couple"