How many of you have lived in shared apartments with friends during your graduate life? Remember the time and effort spent in managing the shared expenses with your roommates? I remember my student life, living in a shared accommodation with friends and sharing my living expenses. It was quite an effort to keep track of the finances. Who owes how much to whom? During my travels and hikes across Europe along with my friends, it would become even more cumbersome to keep track of the expenses. I remember that small notebook we had to update with our names and expenses done, later split the expenses and exchange money.
Google Docs brought us some relief. We could create a Google Doc, mark our expenses in a centralized spreadsheet and share it with our traveling group of friends. Each of us could view and edit the sheet with the expenses we had paid for. This centralization eased the process to a certain extent, but still we had to do our calculations of splitting the bills.
One such student sailing in the same boat was Ashwin, who was a PhD graduate student from Carnegie Mellon University. Our man with brains, sat down and wrote a small script to manage his expenses - to keep track of how much he owed others and how much others owed him. His simple but smart idea formed the base for Buxfer - a social money website.
Buxfer allows users to keep track of their personal finances, regulate and organize loans and IOUs to friends. It informs you of what you owe and what is owed to you, as well as divide bills among a group of users. It has some good features like tagging your expenses, which could help you analyse your expenses in a better manner with some cool graphs and charts. Among other features are support for various currencies, support for multiple languages and integration with other online payment services like PayPal etc. With the growth in social internetworking, Buxfer has plugins and widgets with social sites like Facebook, where you can manage your expenses with your friends on your Facebook list. For all iPhone uses, the good news is that Buxfer has launched its iPhone application too. With some cool graphics its more easier to manage your expenses from your iPhone now.
Google Docs brought us some relief. We could create a Google Doc, mark our expenses in a centralized spreadsheet and share it with our traveling group of friends. Each of us could view and edit the sheet with the expenses we had paid for. This centralization eased the process to a certain extent, but still we had to do our calculations of splitting the bills.
One such student sailing in the same boat was Ashwin, who was a PhD graduate student from Carnegie Mellon University. Our man with brains, sat down and wrote a small script to manage his expenses - to keep track of how much he owed others and how much others owed him. His simple but smart idea formed the base for Buxfer - a social money website.
Buxfer allows users to keep track of their personal finances, regulate and organize loans and IOUs to friends. It informs you of what you owe and what is owed to you, as well as divide bills among a group of users. It has some good features like tagging your expenses, which could help you analyse your expenses in a better manner with some cool graphs and charts. Among other features are support for various currencies, support for multiple languages and integration with other online payment services like PayPal etc. With the growth in social internetworking, Buxfer has plugins and widgets with social sites like Facebook, where you can manage your expenses with your friends on your Facebook list. For all iPhone uses, the good news is that Buxfer has launched its iPhone application too. With some cool graphics its more easier to manage your expenses from your iPhone now.
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