It’s been three days and we are still sorting this out. Quickly running out of food and water because no one wants to add more to the tab. Makes splitting costs for things like road trips very easy when multiple people have expenses. Good cross platform support ensures everyone in the group will be able to use it despite their platform of choice.
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- I just needed to divide up a bill, not charge my friends or keep an account record of this fun time out.
- Each such subgroup must have an aggregate balance of 0, otherwise this subgroup as a whole would owe money to the rest of the people, and we would have to add transactions connecting it to the rest of the group.
- Also, originally (when I first used Splitwise over two years ago) Splitwise would make it so you owed the the least amount of people in the group and the least amount of people owed you.
- So the optimal solution is to find as many disjoint subgroups of people as possible whose total balance is 0, then treat each subgroup as a separate problem, applying the linear solution above.
- During the technical round, I was asked to break down the algorithm for the “Simplify debts” feature for Splitwise.
One of two actions, add an expense or see how much you need to pay. Once you have done any of the above, the next thing you’d want to do is clear your dues. This post is public so feel free to share it, This encourages me to put the time and effort into researching such ideas. Furthermore, users would be localized, you’d ask your friends to install this app and guess where your friends are most likely to live? This is important and advantageous and we’ll use this later. But you see, the problem with Splitwise is that the free version of the app pretty much offers everything one might need killing the incentive to move to premium.
That’s in addition to all the payments you already save by using Splitwise to split your expenses. “Simplify debts” does not change anyone’s total balance. It just reduces the number of payments, so everyone gets paid back quicker. Sometimes you have multiple outstanding balances with a person – $17 for house expenses, $84 for that road trip, another $12 for dinner last night. If you’re in multiple groups with one person, it can be hard to keep track of it all.
If you’re looking to have an app that easily logs money between friends and tracks money owed, THIS IS NOT A GOOD APP FOR YOU ! This app seemed at first to be a great way to keep track of who owes what between friends. But after using it now for over 3 years there have been some changes and it seems to make calculations between different groups and friends waaaaay more complicated than it should be.
- Good cross platform support ensures everyone in the group will be able to use it despite their platform of choice.
- If you’re in multiple groups with one person, it can be hard to keep track of it all.
- It’s been three days and we are still sorting this out.
Has potential but still needs a lot of work
I’ll try to get all the details down here so perhaps the developers can track down these bugs. After nine twilight hour holes on the golf course, abs and about 5 lost balls with a mulligan taken on the ninth by of two of the three players, my friends and I went for Sushi in San Mateo. The sake was cloudy, but still more transparent than the Splitwise settle that was attempted an hour thereafter consumption of said sake (and some woodford reserve). I should also mention – for the sake of completeness- that we were denied a whiteboard advertised toro salmon (correct, salmon not tuna).
Second is the clunky way the splitting up is handled, I really can’t describe what’s going on but there seem to be ghost expensive and some roommates paying more than others, it’s all rather hazy and unclear. After awhile we just went back to the old fashioned way of using a calculator. Keep track of shared expenses, balances, and who owes who.
So you and your friends all use Splitwise – woohoo! You’re not all in a group together, but it would be great if you could get rid of redundant payments, just this once. Let’s start by finding all subsets of people whose aggregate balance is 0. This part is basically the subset sum problem, which is NP-complete. I’m fully brute-forcing it here; there are usually ways to optimize some parts of this type of problem, but I can’t be bothered. Unfortunately, finding the optimal solution is an NP-complete problem.
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Having such a space can also solve another upcoming problem for Splitwise Pay which is increasing the number of payments made through Splitwise wallet in the US by encouraging in-app payments with split-coins. During the technical round, I was asked to break down the algorithm for the “Simplify debts” feature for Splitwise. The second thing that might happen is that the simplification might not actually simplify anything. Things might be simpler for you if the simplification goes through, but at the cost of making things more complicated for your friends. Settle up with a friend and record any cash or online payment.
thoughts on “Debts Made Simple”
All of your personal information, including email address, name, and IP address will be deleted from this site. Any feedback you have provided that others have supported will be attributed to “Anonymous”. All of your ideas without support will be deleted. Next, ignoring the direction of the arrows (i.e. treating the graph as undirected), consider any cycle in the graph, for instance Grace – Ivan – Luke – Mallory. The key insight is that if we add a new set of debts, all for the same amount and in the same direction, between the members of the cycle, nobody’s balance will change. This is true because each person will receive a new credit from the person preceding them in the cycle, and incur a new debt for the same value to the person following them in the cycle, for a net change of 0.
I’ve tried other apps for tracking expenses on a vacation and nothing comes close to using Splitwise.The only issue we had was that one person has android phone and it didn’t seem to have all the same bells and whistles. They could enter the expense but we couldn’t find how to split it for the number in each family. With my iPhone I had to modify the expense to split it properly.thank you to the developer of this application. Join Tomasz and millions of others who keep track of shared expenses and balances with housemates, trips, groups, friends, and family.
Three families just got back from vacation together and we used Splitwise for the trip expenses. I was able to split expenses per number of people in the family (to be fair to everyone there’s a family of 3, 4, and 5), manually enter amounts, or for some expenses we just split it 3 ways. In addition, I found out I can take a picture of the receipt to verify the expense f there’s ever any question. Every family can enter expenses that they paid for and at the end of the trip we just “settle up” and it tells us how much each family owes.
With Venmo, it assumes that the app installed on your phone is the way to go. With money transfer, things need to be explicit and not a side effects. I need to be able to select a PayPal account or Venmo account. I also need the ability to allow usage of Venmo or PayPal, again it is implicit. If the password for Splitwise is leaked, all of a sudden I am getting all the Venmo money for this user. “Simplify debts” is by far the easiest way to get squared up, say, at the end of the month.
It’s actually decently common for NP-hard problems to be approximable by a P algorithm; for instance, the traveling salesman problem as a P approximation that is off by a factor of 1.5 at most. Nudges, simplify debts splitwise explained where you can nudge users for Splitwise to send an anonymous generic reminder notification to clear the dues left with a person. Also, a perfect feature to be put behind a premium paywall.