Travel is a great experience and doing it with a group of friends multiplies the joy. But it also brings its share of hassles. For example, one person may pay for food, another for fuel and yet another may have bought entrance tickets. Keeping tabs on who paid for what, how much and how many times can be complicated. It may also lead to disputes and distrust among friends. This is where apps can be handy and efficient.

Travel accounts

You can download apps, free or paid, for Android or iPhone, to record and divide trip expenses. For example, the Receipt Ninja app lets you split bills and expenses, tracks who still owes and how much. The app allows you to add names and details of group members. For each expense, you can add the amount, category and the person who paid.

You can create new categories of receipts, besides standard ones such as food and fuel. The details of the accounts can be shared with group members, through SMS text, email or cloud storage such as Google Drive and Dropbox.

Also, if more than one person enters data through the app, information can be synced between devices. The app also lets you snap photos of your receipts for reference. For overseas travel, there is also support for multiple currencies. The app is free, but the free version features ads.

Another similar app is Settle Up. This app lets you split bills evenly or in differing amount by person. For example, if one of the members may be paying for two people or a child, their share can be marked accordingly. The data can be exported so that you can do analysis using Excel or other spreadsheets.

Others such as Splitwise also offer similar features. The app also lets you track people you owe money to, who owe you and who has settled debts. Tricount, which can be used as an app or online, also has a balance screen to see which members are in the red and who is in the green. To avoid one or more members owing a lot of money, the app also suggests who can pay next, to minimise payment imbalances. The Friend debt tracker app allows you to send reminders on expenses through email or SMS.

Nearly all apps let you add group member details by taking information from your phone contacts. Typically, the apps would let you create multiple events with its own set of group members.

This is helpful as you may be sharing expenses with different people based on the occasion. Some apps also work offline and only need internet when synchronising information or sharing data among the group.

Splitting unequal expenses

Unlike other expenses, eating out involves additional complications and extra calculations. For example, when splitting dinner, dividing the bill equally would be unfair to someone who didn’t drink, or just had an appetiser.

You may want to use special apps to handle food expenses. For example, Plates by Splitwise is an iPhone app that lets you divide food bills. You can itemise some items and split the rest. For example, you can itemise drinks and split the meal equally; or indicate members who skipped the main course and then split the rest.

Billr is a paid iPhone app that calculates what everyone owes for their own entrées and splits shared items such as appetisers. The app will also add tax and tip and send details of the bill to the group through email or SMS.

Divvy, another paid iPhone app, lets you snap a picture of your receipt, drag each item to the person who’ll be paying for it. The app also automatically adds the appropriate tax and tip to each person’s portion.

Making payments

Often, settling the accounts is not easy. People forget to pay and need to be given reminders. This can be done through the bill splitting apps. Even if they remember, they may not have cash or the right change to settle dues. Online payments, with mobile, can ease these pains.

With the Settle up and Splitwise apps, you can make payments via PayPal directly from your phone. Apps such as Mypoolin can be used to transfer money from and to bank accounts, besides splitting the bill. Typically, payment apps are compliant with international PCI-DSS standards for payment security.

Rather than be limited by the expense management apps, you can use more standard apps to do the funds transfer. For instance, you can also use wallets for funds transfer.

Several banks allow money transfers via their proprietary smartphone apps. Besides banks, if you want to pay globally, to say someone’s PayPal account, Venmo is a popular app.

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