I Link You

easy way to track shared bills and expenses

Buxfer is a free online web service that lets you and your roommates keep track of shared expenses and bills. Started by three graduate students who struggled to figure out whose turn it was to pay for food, they wrote this small and simple script to keep track of debts and expenses. Playing on the world "bucks" and "transfer," this online application is meant to simplify the tracking of shared expenses between friends.

This service seems like a godsend as I just finished fall quarter at UChicago only to be reminded that I will be emailed by my roommate about electricity or gas expenses for the past couple of months. Granted, I am responsible, and I will gladly pay my share of all the bills. However, I often feel uncomfortable when I blindly pay without seeing the bill. As I do not spend much time in my apartment except for sleeping and showering relative to my other roommates, I often feel shortchanged when I pay my "share" of the bills. In my current living situation, I have three roommates who share the expenses such as rent, grocery, electricity, cooking gas, and DSL internet in vary degrees of usage. With papers, problem sets, work, and extracurricular activities, it is often hard for me to keep track how much I owe whom without having a sneaking suspicion that I am paying more than my share.

All you need is an email to register for the Buxfer service. Your Buxfer homepage shows "net balance" which is the sum of group balances and contact balances, "news" (aka notifications), and a transaction-line-view of the ten most recent transactions you have participated in. You can report transactions either as a "shared bill," "lend or settle loan," or a "personal expense." After classifying the transaction, the site will ask what "group" it should apply this expense to. Transaction details allow you to see amounts paid, received, or spent by transaction partcipants, the amounts that the transaction participants owe or receive, and previous edits as well as comments posted to the transaction. Your site also has a section for contacts for all your transactions, and you can create groups for your transactions as well. You can also tag your transactions, so you can easily see the transaction history for a particular tag (i.e. apartment rent). There is also another page where you can leave feedback to the masterminds behind this site.

In this day and age where college students and young professionals are becoming increasingly connected with each other, this web service will be a sleeper hit once users find out how easy it is to use the site. You can log into this site using your Facebook or Yahoo! ID as well. The only downside is that there is no way to actively transfer funds through this site as it only keeps tracks of expenses rather than allow the user to directly pay expenses (like PayPal). As the founders are dedicated to keep this site free, they are still trying to figure out a way to enable this feature on their website. As Google just announced a "pay transfer" system similar to PayPal, these founders may have found a way to use advertising revenue as a way to fund a system like PayPal's.

It's pretty impressive that this site already tracks more than $1.7 million dollars in almost 8000 transactions, and these numbers still continue the climb. I believe these three grad students have found a niche. I'm already a convert, and I will surely get my roommates to use this system when I come back from Paris.

Labels: buxfer, shared expense tracking, social networking

posted by Koh @ 10:10 AM