Shared Bill Management: A Free Online Service

tr1stan

Dear MSE readers (but mainly students ),

After reading the "do's & don'ts" it says to contact a Board Admin through PM if they are unsure about breaking a rule, I have tried contacting Wirm, but his PM mailbox is full

I'm a fellow student who also finds money saving and money management of great interest. As I'm sure all of you well know, after being a student for several years you get used to having to share houses with other students, with shared housing comes shared bills, and with shared bills come the hassle of making sure that everyone is paid up-to-date and knows exactly what they are paying for.

After trying to keep on top of things using the good old pen and paper, I decided that there must be a better way to handle all these bills and started to search for a website that must be able to help me keep track of my shared expenses. In February of last year, I could not find a thing. A hole in the market was found and with a friend we started the production of a completely free site that is designed to help people keep track of their money.

Billster (http://www.billster.net) was released in January of this year, and I know for a fact, and I hope you agree, that this site would have been so very useful when I started sharing bills with other people.

Please let me know what you think about Billster, there is a demo at http://demo.billster.net - which means you can have a play without even registering.

If I've gone about this all wrong, can you let me know how I should go about letting people know about this free service. I totally understand that people are going to not like that I've posted a link to a website on my very first post, but please note that I have spent every spare moment of my free time (at the expense of my looming MSc deadlines) to produce this site so that everyone can manage their shared expenses for free!

Thanks,

Tristan Blackwell

ps: I take feedback/criticisms quite well, so if you have any ideas on how to improve the service, then let me know.

Oldernotwiser

In my day we managed with pen and paper but perhaps this is progress.

Blacksheep1979

I dunno, this continued dumbing down of everything doesn't really help people. How hard is it for when a bill hits the mat everyone coughs up?

tr1stan

Hi Oldernotwiser & Blacksheep, Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Oldernotwiser, I hope that Billster is a progression in managing finance, be it shared or not.
20 years ago people will have "managed" to organise their bills, make sure that every one got their money in on time and paid their split by noting the amounts on the back of an envelope or the side of a cigarette packet. Then came the introduction of the spreadsheet, some people would adapt at using this package to keep track of the bills and remind them to remind their house mates when they owed the bill payer money. Then came Billster (totally ignoring the popularity and accessibility increase of the the Internet ), an application designed to prevent a user from having spreadsheet skills or paper lying about (that will inevitably be thrown away at some point).

Billster allows a customer to record a bill, be it monthly, annually, every 6 days, 1 payment, 4 payments, or perhaps an infinite amount of payments because you don't know how long you're going to live at an address. It also allows you split each payment across a set number of people, in this example your house mates.
If a payment is due, the people who are connected to the bill will receive an email letting them know that the bill payer would like payment. If the person receiving the email has also signed-up for an account, the payment will be saved in their system too - allowing them to see how much money they've spent on "Bill x" in the last x months.

The purpose of this system is not just to help you work out how much a bill is, but to help you keep on top of where your money is going to and coming from.
As well as sharing housing bills with other people, I also work on quite a few freelance projects during the year, and I use Billster to remind me of which clients still owe me money - I recently found this to be very useful when calculating my Self Assessment TAX return.

Blacksheep, I find it hard to see how this system is dumbing anything down, I'd be interested in knowing why you think that is.
Although I agree that in a perfect world, having house mates pay for their portion of a bill straight away would solve of lot of the issues, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a shared house that doesn't have a person that is a little hard to get money from, away on holiday, waiting for payday etc.

Just out of interest, did either of you look at the site or is it just the concept you don't really like?

Tristan

Neato

Now I know this is probably just me being stupid BUT when I add a bill that bill doesnt come out of my income ie say I earn £100 I then say I spend £100 on food. The pie chart shows that 50% of my income is outgoing and that I have £200 :S Anyway to get around this?

Impet_Limpet

I think this is an excellent idea, thank you

Oldernotwiser

I don't see how this would solve the problem of people who won't cough up for their share. I also don't see that sending people emails is any improvement on reminding them when you see them or leaving them notes. This is a technical solution for what is basically a personal problem.

Oldernotwiser

Following on from my last post, if you look at this current thread

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=393751

you will see how your website would have no effect whatsoever on the problems that arise with shared bills.

squawkbox

I have to say that I think this system is great. Currently I use a spreadsheet which is not very userfriendly and takes a while to compose each month. This method is a lot better and its something that I would like to try out.

I currently have differening ways of dealing with the bills though. Direct Debits come straight from the bank account, they are the same each month - so we all have a standing order set up to put the money in. Although this is part of the finance for the place, its always paid and I don't see how I could add this into the website. However shopping is one item that this could be very helpful for and I look forward to see how others start to use it.

kittiwoz

I've had a bit of a look at this website and think it looks pretty useful. I want to keep better track of my finances and I was just going to note all my spending down on paper (which I probably will anyway) but this could be a good way of keeping all the info together and it looks like it will show very clearly what are major and minor expenses and how my cash-flow varies because of the graphs and charts it generates. I have only had a quick shuftie at the demo and not really tried using it so if I have any particular issues when I do I'll report back.

It won't help with group bills in situations where people deliberately don't pay and dig their heels in but I think most of these problems are more to do with disorganisation and in those situations it might help to have email reminders. It makes it seem a bit more like an official invoice so it might prompt people to pay up more promptly if they are usually a bit laissez faire.

tr1stan

squawkbox, I'm really pleased you like what you've seen so far. With regards to your Direct Debits, you could add the reoccurring bill with the automatic payment date set to whenever it is, this will log your outgoings even though you don't have to interact with them because they are automatic.

kittiwoz, I think you've hit the nail right on the head, this system was never designed as a solution to the problem of people deliberately not paying their bills but as a means to make sure people could keep track of them if they wanted. You're are never going to be able to force someone to pay a bill without getting a higher force (such as the small claims court, or a pair of thumbscrews) involved.

Neato:

Now I know this is probably just me being stupid BUT when I add a bill that bill doesnt come out of my income ie say I earn £100 I then say I spend £100 on food. The pie chart shows that 50% of my income is outgoing and that I have £200 :S Anyway to get around this?

How did you add the bills, ie: what type for what bill?
For recording an incoming amount, that should come under the "Others Owe You" bill type with the name of the person or company (perhaps your employer) paying you money. The outgoing bill should then be of either "Personal" or "You owe others" bill type. That way you would have a neutral balance with 50% (£100) as your outgoings and 50% (£100) as your incoming.



Tristan