An update: we’re still not planning to add the concept of a payment for a specific bill or a specific expense. We’ve left this idea under review for many years, but we’re not convinced it’s the right idea for Splitwise. We think focusing on a total balance makes things simpler in most cases. This is also how a bank balance works.
Here’s two potential work-arounds if you’re not satisfied:
1. Let’s say you want to set things up so you can see if people have specifically paid for a certain bill, or for a certain month of expenses. You can create a group just for that bill or month – then, when viewing that group, you will only see balances owed from that specific bill or set of bills.
2. Once you pay an amount and want to keep track of it being for a certain bill, you could use a comment on the payment and the expense. This would allow you to note down your intentions.
Also, since this request was added, we’ve added the following feature: if you ever /fully/ settle up with a friend or group, we automatically hide all bills before that time behind a tap or click to make things cleaner. This way, you generally can see only which bills specifically are affecting the group or friendship balance. (If things have been only partially settled, we leave everything visible.)
If you’d like to share more about why this feature is important to you, or why these workarounds are not sufficient, we always appreciate specific feedback so we can understand how it could help you specifically. For this reason, we’ll leave the request “under review”
An update: we’re still not planning to add the concept of a payment for a specific bill or a specific expense. We’ve left this idea under review for many years, but we’re not convinced it’s the right idea for Splitwise. We think focusing on a total balance makes things simpler in most cases. This is also how a bank balance works.
Here’s two potential work-arounds if you’re not satisfied:
1. Let’s say you want to set things up so you can see if people have specifically paid for a certain bill, or for a certain month of expenses. You can create a group just for that bill or month – then, when viewing that group, you will only see balances owed from that specific bill or set of bills.
2. Once you pay an amount and want to keep track of it being for a certain bill, you could use…
First, thank you and your team for Splitwise. I still use it and it is great. I'm glad you have responded to the issues that everyone here has posted about and made the update you made a couple of years ago. I'm sorry to say that I think this is still a big issue, because this is something that should have always been and should be at the foundation of the software. I really don't think the system needs to be a "checklist" per say, but I think at the root, the user should HAVE TO "marry" a payment directly to an expense and only at that point should an expense be deemed "closed".
If there is more than 1 expense open, there should be a way to apply defined $ amounts to each expense owed. If any payment is made that is greater than all expenses, a pop-up box should ask if the user wants to lend money to his friend in the amount of the residual... Or it should force the user to have to enter another expense. If the amount paid is less than the expense that is being paid for, that item should remain an "open expense" and there should be something that says "username paid $125 toward this item, amount owed is $132."
Because this deals with money, there should not be any money "floating around." Every dollar should be accounted for first on an item by item level, and then THE ITEMS should add up on a rolling level.
If there are things that you are trying to do that make this difficult, I would say that this is probably more important than most of the bells and whistles out there.
Thank you for your hard work here! I do like this software a lot and I realize that this would probably be very hard to implement, but if you did I think it would make a lot of users very happy.
-Steve
Anonymous
Hi Jon,
First, thank you and your team for Splitwise. I still use it and it is great. I'm glad you have responded to the issues that everyone here has posted about and made the update you made a couple of years ago. I'm sorry to say that I think this is still a big issue, because this is something that should have always been and should be at the foundation of the software. I really don't think the system needs to be a "checklist" per say, but I think at the root, the user should HAVE TO "marry" a payment directly to an expense and only at that point should an expense be deemed "closed".
If there is more than 1 expense open, there should be a way to apply defined $ amounts to each expense owed. If any payment is made that is greater than all expenses, a pop-up box should ask if the user wants to lend money to his friend in the amount of the residual... Or it should force the user to have to enter another expense. If the amount paid is less than the expense that is being paid for, that item should remain an "open expense" and there should be something that says "username paid $125 toward this item, amount owed is $132."
Because this deals with money, there should not be any money "floating around." Every dollar should be accounted for first on an item by item level, and then THE ITEMS should add up on a rolling level.
If there are things that you are trying to do that make this difficult, I would say that this is probably more important than most of the bells and whistles out there.
Thank you for your hard work here! I do like this software a lot and I realize that this would probably be very hard to implement, but if you did I think it would make a lot of users very happy.
-Steve