We already have the Christmas period which is usually linked to a marathon of gift buying and other expenses (dinners, trips) which can be enormous. And more and more, between individual expenses and those we share with other people, It seems we need a master’s degree in business finance to control all expenses.
Over the years, this led to me having to track these expenses one way or another. And after carrying around a history of errors, confusions and debts resulting from errors, I finally found a way to being able to keep the shopping chaos under control with my iPhone.
Bizum works, but sometimes it’s not enough
A first approach to maintaining control over the purchase of gifts is to use Bizum, something that the vast majority of Spaniards use. If, for example, you buy a gift for your parents with your brother and you are in charge of the purchase, this brother can send you money instantly through Bizum and you can take the management out of it.
Ideally this article would end here, but Such a simple method always has drawbacks.. Your brother may forget, or maybe it’s your turn to pay and you don’t have a balance at the time. Or maybe there are going to be so many financial transactions that you’re worried about exceeding Bizum’s limits and not being able to use the service for a while. This can happen during Christmas travel periods when individual and group purchases increase.
The simple solution: Splitwise on your iPhone
One solution to the approach I’m telling you about is to open a spreadsheet in Numbers, filling it from the iPhone with each purchase. But not everyone controls the handling of the calculations in this document, and the cure could prove worse than the disease.
But There is an app for iPhone that can solve this problem: Splitwise. Available for free in the App Store, this utility helps us with a simple interface to record all the purchases that a group has to share together (whether gifts, dinner or a trip). And when the spending sequence ends, Splitwise tells us who should pay how much money to whom in as few transactions as possible.
The best thing about Splitwise is your flexibility when it comes to sharing these expenses. This is not limited to the distribution between all members of the group: in each of the purchases you record, you can indicate if there is anyone who is not included in the distribution of the expense. Or for example, someone has ordered something particularly expensive for a meal and offers to pay a little more on their own. Splitwise may save this data.
Each member of the group can check the status of purchases from their own phone, just as they can check it from their own Splitwise if it is installed on the phone. In this way There is no one person who should be responsible for recording everything, each member of the group can add their purchases. The last action will be to access the “Debt Settlement” section to find out the transactions that each member of the group must carry out.
Another advantage is that we don’t all need to have an iPhone to access Splitwise: the service has an equivalent application for Android and a web version so that no one can escape their share.
Splitwise is a free app, but it reserves some additional features (charts, ticket scanning, large groups with many transactions) after an in-app purchase. Anyway, If your use is one-off, we are only talking about a payment of 2.99 dollars for a month of unlimited use. Something that can easily be distributed among members of a group that does a lot of shopping to simplify the process.
The advantage is that everything is settled with a minimum number of transfers or Bizums, and no one has to do chaotic calculations which can lead to confusion. I’m not saying the alternatives of using a spreadsheet and/or apps like reminders don’t work, but Splitwise transforms what is initially a puzzle into something very simple.
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