Brenna’s App of the Week: Splitwise

You might remember, or you might not, I wrote a blog post for a similar app called Tricount BUT I found a better one – Splitwise. I’ll give you a quick run down of the app, why I like it better than Tricount, and provide a quick comparison between the two.

If you aren’t familiar with Tricount or Splitwise, they are apps that help keep track of shared expenses between housemates, trips, groups, friends, family, and whomever else. Splitwise helps track balances for shared expenses and easily tells you who owes whom and how much. When you enter an expense into the app, you’re given four options in terms of how the expense should be split, which is helpful. As an example, there’s been a few times where my roommate has owed me for a few items from the grocery store, so I just throw the amount into the app and select the option that says she owes me the full amount and it adds it to our balance.

The app is especially useful for roommates or for group trips, there’s usually lots of purchases made and by different people so the app makes it easy to combine everything in one place. This way you aren’t sending one-off payments to each other, when you’re likely to get a payment back from that person at some point in the near future.

My favorite feature of the app are the payment integrations with Venmo and PayPal. The payment integration allows you to settle the balance of your shared expenses with the click of a button. When you set up your account, you can integrate your PayPal or Venmo account right away. There’s also an option to record a cash payment when you are settling.

Here’s two reasons why I like Splitwise better. The first reason is because Splitwise has more options when it comes to splitting an expense, Tricount only had two options. The second reason is the payment integration. In my version of Tricount there aren’t payment integrations. When you want to settle you have to add it to your balance to zero it out and then go into Venmo, PayPal, or your preferred payment app, and pay the person what they are owed. There’s an option in the app to ‘mark as paid’ and then you can invite the person to pay via text or another channel. While this isn’t a huge deal, having the payment integration makes it that much easier.

Here’s a quick comparison between the two:

Are you using a different app to track shared expenses? If so, I’d be interested to hear how you like it!