Debt shuffling across groups
I really like Splitwise and I use it regularly to keep track of my shared transactions with other people. However I find it difficult to keep track of expenses across different groups. For instance, sometimes I would like to transfer debt from one group to the other, such that in the first group the debt is settled but in the second it will show up. This would be a great addition to my debt management routine.
To exemplify my request I will illustrate that with my father's recent visit. He came to visit me at home and I created a group to share expenses between him, me and my girlfriend. When he was visiting me, we decided to spend a weekend, the three of us and another friend. For that, I created a new group just to track the expenses for that sub-trip as I didn't want a fourth person to pee on the main group tracking my father's visit. Once the weekend trip was over, I wanted to transfer the debts between me, my father and my girlfriend to the main group and just leave the debts outstanding with my fourth friend. However, I find this function didn't exist which led me to individually settle each debt on the weekend trip group and transfer than to the main group. This solution partially solved the problem, but I lost track of the categories of the expenses and was time consuming.
Another case that usually arises is when I travel with me and my girlfriend and other people. At the end of trip I would like to transfer the debt between me and my girlfriend to our main group account in order to centralize debts.
I wonder if you guys have already considered doing something like this, as it seems it would be a great idea to shuffle debt across groups.
Guilherme Zagatti
shared this idea
Thanks for the suggestion! There is a very basic version of this feature on our website – click on a specific person in the left sidebar, then click the settings icon at the top of the right sidebar and choose “Consolidate debts with this person”. All your groups will be settled up, and the remaining balance will be transferred to a single non-group bill.
We’ve also thought about a few other versions of this feature, but unfortunately it’s been really difficult to find a design that doesn’t confuse people. (Even the single-group “simplify debts” feature confuses a large percentage of people.) For now, we’ve decided to leave out any more complicated debt shuffling features, as the increase in confused/frustrated users seems to outweigh the benefits. Apologies for the trouble!
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Anonymous
commented
I have also been looking for a similar feature. For instance. I often travel with Friend A - so we have a group. I travel with Friend B so we have a group. The three of us travel together, and there is no way to consolidate the debts across our three different groups, to make end of the day payments simple. It has become really frustrating and has led to lots of double handling.
A simple toggle system that allows you to consolidate debt with a particular set of people across a particular set of groups would be super simple to use and very clear, giving lots of flexibility
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Saverio CAMPISI
commented
If a friend of mine has a debt with me in a group A, while I have a debt with him/her and other people in a different group B with the "simplify debts" feature enable, the tool should create a single debt in the group B towards the friend who owes me money.
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Sean Jeremiah
commented
Consolidating debts among same friends across different groups would be great.
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Anonymous
commented
Please introduce "simplify-debts" within multiple groups. I owe someone int one group and he owes me something in other group -> this should get simplified.
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Prashant Verma
commented
if a friend F1 belongs to group G1 and G2 both.
F1 owes you 50 in G1, and you owe 50 to someone else, say F2, in group G2. As F1 and F2 both are in G2, just transfer the expense or settlement amount from G1 to G2 and now F1 will directly owes 50 to F2, I'm free. -
Théo Zimmermann
commented
With my friends, we have a group to share expenses when we go out together and we create special groups when we go on vacation. This is useful because we include only those who come and it makes adding expenses simpler. At the end of the day, we would like to transfer the resulting debts back to the main group. Currently our way of doing this is to record two separates cash payment, but this is quite annoying.