I have been hunting high and low for a solution that will enable me to track shared expenses such as ‘Bob paid $100 for the two train tickets, therefore Margaret owes him $50’. In my mind such a system is only useful if firstly, it makes input of the expenses quick and painless (such as with a nice iPhone App or web-based interface with a slick mobile version) and secondly, makes the sharing of this data equally effortless (which I think can only be done with centralized service that each person sharing the expenses would need an account on).
I’ve come across 8+ commercial solutions that are supposed to address this problem but none of them combine those two simple features.
The closest I’ve found is called Credeble, but their App is unavailable from the AppStore (perhaps it was removed or something? only seems to be linking to the Dutch App store).
Can anyone tell me if there is a solution currently available that would fit these criteria?
Have you played around with mint.com?
I could easily see this being done with my desktop version of Quicken - e.g. enter a transaction for 100 dollars, and categorize it as half belonging to the Bob category, and half belonging to the Margaret category.
Mint.com online would, I think, work similarly (it was a separate product, then the Intuit / Quicken people bought mint.com and terminated their own online product).
As far as I can tell, though, when I looked at this for some Girl Scout accounting, it has to be tied to at least one “real” bank account.
What I wound up doing was setting up a spreadsheet and uploading it to google docs. I set up mine with one column for “the troop” where troopwide funds were held, and one column for each girl where “her” funds (proceeds from her cookie sales, expenses paid on her behalf) were recorded. If she had proceeds, I recorded it as a positive number, if I paid for something for her, it had a negative number. At the very bottom was a running total so I always knew how much each girl had set aside for her.
You can share your spreadsheet with both Bob and Margaret so both can see and/or edit it. Each has a column on the spreadsheet. Then whenever anyone needs to enter a new purchase, you enter a new row, and put 50 dollars under Bob’s column and 50 under Margaret’s column.
If, say, you’re Bob and you’re the banker, and Margaret owes you money, then when she pays you, you put a negative amount under her column and a positive under yours (showing the money is transferred from her to you).
Oh - and while this is not as “slick” as an actual app, it does have the advantage of being a) free, and b) available anywhere you have an internet connection, be it desktop, smartphone, or tablet.