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.

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.
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Anonymous commented
This idea is geared for couples who share finances, such as a shared bank account, so that either person in that couple can see and take care of both their own and their spouse's expenses. But retaining the easy ability to split the amount of the bill evenly among the individuals in the couple and maintaining separate accounts.
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Nicole M commented
I just want to add that the grouping people for settling up, as suggested by Bernard below, would be great for us. My husband and I have a roommate and we split a lot of expenses in thirds, where he and I are responsible for 2/3 and she for 1/3. Because of this, it seems we need to keep the accounts separate so we're not constantly having to manually split the transactions equally. However, it would be great to group us together at the settle-up period to simplify the settling up. Thanks!
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Anonymous commented
Desperately needs the feature to link couples accounts when reconciling. Fine to treat them as a single person, but annoying when 1 person is owed a lot and the other then has to pay. This could be a feature of 'simplified debts' as mostly couples will reconcile together not as one payer.
Thanks!
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Anonymous commented
It would be great to have a feature for one couple or family to be able to enter expenses together. After a weekend with friends, splitwise says I owe my husband money. That seems dumb.
However, we still need to be counted as two shares of each expense. Another user reported combining a couple's account into one, but won't that mean that they're only paying 1/2 their share?
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Renan commented
I have a suggestion for the simplification prioritization algorithm.
Imagine the couples AB, CD, and EF.
A, C, and E buy groceries for a reunion.When applied the current simplification, Spliwise will suggest something like B pays C, D pays E, and F pays A for a debt simplification.
It would be much easier - in real life - to settle up a debt like B->A, D->C, and F->E, but right now there is no way to tell Splitwise about that organization.
My suggestion is that persons on a group can have tags added to them. Like "couple1". So you could do this:
A "couple1", B "couple1", C "couple2", D "couple2", E "bf", and F "bf".
With that, Splitwise would try to simplify the debts within the microgroups (defined by the arbitrary tags) first. One tag per person would be sufficient for most cases.
If you guys like to be challenged, this could go deeper. A family gathering group could be organized like this. Ex:
A couple1 fatherside cityA
B couple1 cityB
C couple2 fatherside cityB
D couple2 cityB
E bf motherside cityA
F bf fatherside motherside cityA
G fatherside
H fatherside
I fatherside
JSplitwise would clusterize the expenses and try to simplify debts within the implicits microgroups.
So [couple1, couple2, bf, fathersize], then [cityB, motherside] then [cityA], then the non-taggeds ("J"). -
Matthew Hewitt commented
on a trip where sometimes both parts of a couple are at a meal, but sometimes just one. when it comes time to settle up it would be nice if my wife and i and the other couples could be treated as one - paying together.
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Dan Owen commented
+1
It's just a basic feature you would expect -
Dipesh Dugar Mitthalal commented
I am organizing a trip for family members and equally split all expenses.
Then a person X pays me for Y , In this case Y owes should be settled instead of X -
Sagar commented
It would be great if instead of applying multiple weights you could add an option for people "paying together." I have a trip with 3 couples and we added all 6 people so everyone could add expenses for what they paid for, but that just adds additional payments when we're ready to settle up. It would be awesome if you could identify someone you're paying with as a factor in settling up to simplify debts.
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Iris Heylen commented
Is there any progress on this feature? Would be a great improvement!
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Jeff Chien commented
I desire the ability to keep individual accounts (i.e. one for myself, one for my wife) so that friends can easily assign itemized shares to each of us. Make it so that when settling up you can combine multiple people as one entity for showing debt to or money owed from others. I suppose you'd have to specify which member of the entity is to be paid.
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Natasha commented
We recently used Splitwise on a trip and whilst it was a fantastic way to keep track of expenses in a group of 9, the same thing kept coming up. This was that it would be really useful to be able to pair up people in a group who are couples so that 2/9 of the expenses can be assigned to them as a couple rather than 1/9 per individual, or assigning multiple email addresses to one account - v useful if they have a joint account. This would avoid the situation where the final (simplified) settling up means one half of a couple paying the other half $300 (out of the same account!), as has happened with us!
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Anonymous commented
This would be a great feature! It comes up every time I use splitwise as well!
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Jacob MacDonald commented
With large group it is pretty common to have couples who share bank accounts, and end up "repaying" each other. This doesn't really matter but it could simplify things if you could make groups of people just for repayment purposes.
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Alex commented
I recently went on holiday with a group of friends, some people in couples and some not. At the end of the trip I had to manually combine the balances of some people (e.g. me and my fiance). It would be good to have the option to combine people together to prevent this extra step.
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charlee commented
e.g. when couples travel together in groups, sometimes the individuals will do separate activities and eat/ drink different amounts - but in the end, they use one bank account to pay. (I love splitwise by the way - thank you!)
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Illimar Tambek commented
This would be the killer feature I'm looking for!
I strongly agree with Elias below. It would be great if we could add some expenses as a couple/family, but also for individuals, so it's possible to see personal spending, on a trip for example.
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Julie Kendall commented
I second this. We love the app, but everytime we travel with couples this exact topic gets discussed.
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Susan Murphy commented
I strongly support Bernard Siebens comment below. It's very helpful to have each individual separate for distributing costs, but when it comes to settling-up, I'd like to group couples/families. I'm currently using this for a group vacation and it's been great at letting us separate costs shared among all, and costs only shared among those who participated in a particular activity.
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Bernard Siebens commented
+1 on this one. We travel in a group with a some couples and some single persons and not everyone is always present everywhere. So keeping the items separate but combining persons when settling up would be ideal.