Apply payment directly to expense/pay for individual items
When a payment is made, you should be able to select the associated expense(s) & enter a $ amount to which expense the payment should be applied to.

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”
-
CPG84 commented
We have just set up this app initially thought it was perfect. But because items have different due dates and types, (outside of a month) as well as level of importance, we would prefer to note what specifically has been paid by each person . ie. the water bill is more important than the payment for the movie tickets.
It should not be difficult to separate the items for the person and then they can select it as "settled" rather than the amount. The total owed would then go down by that much... -
AdityaSree commented
Oh please, I guess this is the most crucial feature missing in splitwise at the moment. Since I have many unique transactions with wine particular person I ended up just creating 5 groups only with both of us! This is a very crude work around. So is adding a comment /note. Also it would be great to add add the feature supporting settling up partially for a bill as well.
-
Kevin Cooper commented
Why not offer your users both options. Keep the simplicity allowing them to settle a total balance, but also allow them to itemize settling only the expenses they intend to pay for. Just because a balance is entered into SplitWise, does not mean it must be paid. Case in point - I'm a divorced dad who pays and stays current on child support payments. I understand that supplemental expenses come into play in this scenario for which SplitWise is a decent solution for tracking. That said, I have a final say in which payments I make/don't make. Your simplicity only design actually makes this overly complex! So again, why not add the itemization that the majority of the comments here are asking for but also keep your "simplicity".
-
Allie commented
With multiple expenses being listed and settled on Splitwise and paid through PayPal (or Venmo), it would be extremely helpful to have a detail of the transaction included about the expenses that were settled. Being able to see that a person paid their portion of bill A, bill B, and bill C would seem helpful for those of us who need to keep closer track of their spending and reimbursement. If I see that I owe money but I'm not told what it is for, I do not trust the app. Perhaps the calculation that goes into "settling up" can just be translated into a receipt to be included as a note with the payment in the outside vendor!
-
Jay Patel commented
Let's take a scenario. I live on rent. I also pay a share of electricity bill. My landlord adds rent and electricity biill on Splitwise. Now, I pay rent on 1st and electricity bill on 21st. So, there should be an option that allows you to pay individual expenses such as electricity bill on my case, which will show that I have paid electricity bill rather than adding an additional expense for that from my side. I hope you understood my point. I am sorry if the explanation is not accurate. Feel free to contact me.
-
Sachin Rk commented
please add credit card also for payment
-
Dana Breckbill commented
How do I mark a recurring expense to show my room mate paid his half and I paid mine? Roommate paid $800. Trying to go back and apply payment to multiple expenses. The only option I see is to edit or delete the expense. How do I mark the expense "paid" for this month next to roommates name?
-
Larica Ryda Bawar commented
I'd like to see this feature! Sometimes you just don't pay everything at once.
-
Sandacious commented
I’ve created a Travel Group and created 1 Expense for a train ticket that is split equally between 3 people. As the funds were paid back to me individually it would be cool if within a single expense I could mark which person had paid for their ticket and keep track of who still owed what for specific expenses.
-
Richard Inglés commented
Why list individual expenses when one cannot record individual payments? It's called "parallel structure" - it makes sense.
Yeah, I get the idea that you want to keep the app simple, but after I partially settle it still says I "owe" money for this, which I don't because I paid a specific amount based on the specific debts I was paying.
In short, I am seriously OCD, and the fact that I cannot record individual debts as paid offends every molecule of my hyper-ordered being. :-)
-
Donald Singh Khan Mathew Chen Li commented
Anybody who want this exclusive feature can pay $999999999999 to splitwise :) it will be available for him. Cheers...!!!
-
Romina Stiglitz commented
When I see that my debts are settled- I want to see each time (which date) i settled my balance. That time I can control my budget better
-
Anonymous commented
How do I create a group on Splitwise which I will be updating daily? How can I maintain this group when everyday some one else is paying the money?
-
Jon commented
It's been 5 years of planning, where is this feature?
-
Mike commented
Add Android Pay as well!
-
Stephanie Hsu commented
Yeah
-
Jonathan Robert Lassiter commented
Justin Clifford's comment makes sense! Just spent over an hour trying to calculate whether one of my roommates was partially responsible for a late fee for not paying on time. This would help a lot!
-
Anonymous commented
I actually disagree and hope that you will never implement this. Splitwise is great for its simplicity and rolling balance philosophy. I feel like this capability would only over-complicate things. If some guy owes me $50, I don't really care if that $50 is slated for expense A or expense B. All that matters is the guy needs to pay me $50. Despite reading every comment below to try to enlighten myself, I still can't figure out a possible situation where this would ever be useful.
Also, "Simplify Debts" is by far the best feature of Splitwise. Applying a payment to a specific expense definitely breaks down there.
Just wanted to share my $0.02 with the dissenting opinion.
-
Anonymous commented
I definitely think that these points are all valid. And to keep the topic fresh for the Splitwise team, I am adding my request for a need to somehow show a specific items as being paid. Someone suggested even a strikethrough feature that would better than nothing. Maybe this will speed up your creative juices. This feature would be worth a $.99 one-time charge if you added it!
-
Justin Clifford commented
Came to Splitwise from SpotMe, and the way they did it was actually pretty simple. Each expense had its own balance and they were all added up into a main balance per person. If you decided to make a payment by selecting the person, rather than a specific expense, the payment would apply to the oldest amount(s) that were still not yet settled. So for example, if you had expense 1 of $20, expense 2 of $10, and expense 3 of $5, and you didn't pick a specific expense before adding a payment, and paid $31, expense 1 and 2 would be settled, with the payment being linked to both of them, and expense 3 would have $1 settled and $4 remaining, also with the payment being linked to it.