Eventually, you’re probably going to owe someone money, even if it’s only for a short time. This is particularly true if you’re living with one or more roommates. In order for everyone to co-habitate effectively, you’ll pretty much have to work out some sort of system for splitting the expenses. If you’re using such a system – or your friends are the sorts of people who expect to be reimbursed for their debts – you’ll need to actively keep track of what you owe. Unfortunately, this can often seem like an exercise in effective aspirin use.
In short, keeping all your debts in check can sometimes seem like it’s more trouble than its worth.
Not surprisingly, there’s an app for that. What Do I Owe You is a website that allows you to easily split bills and keep track of existing debts and payments.
The layout is deceptively simple – it starts with two persons by default, and allows you to add a virtually unlimited number of individuals to the list. Once you’ve gotten everyone on record, you can then add a bill to any of the entries.
Let’s try an example calculation. Steve, James, and John are all living in an apartment where the rent is $1250 a month.
We’ll name the first entry “Rent” and then add a bill with a value of 1250. At that point, we add Steve, John, and James. None of them have any bills under their name because we’re trying to calculate a single value. As you can see, it splits the bill evenly. Now let’s see what happens when we add a few more expenses – let’s say Steve pays for the Internet fees, while John covers groceries. Naturally, the two of them will pay slightly less for rent. Again, the calculations are accurate and instantaneous. As you can see, you can add a label to each bill value to keep track of what each bill actually represents.
In addition, What Do I Owe You also allows you to save your progress (tying the session to your browser using a cookie), enabling long-term tracking of your debts and the debts of your friends. If you’re feeling particularly non-confrontational, you can even send an IOU message via email, allowing you to notify your friends that they owe you money without even talking to them. Pretty great, right?
What Do I Owe You also rather sensibly features a mobile site, as well. After all, most people are probably going to be accessing this site when they’re out for dinner and trying to figure out how to accurately split a bill between themselves. Chances are pretty good that they’re not going to have their PCs at hand in such a situation.
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