Settle Up

Posted by: Veronica September 5, 2011 in Android App Reviews, Finance Leave a comment

Money is one of the most essential things we deal with in our everyday life. Expenses, debts and credit are always a part of living. Money matters should be clear and settled before time specially when you share your expenses with your friends or colleagues who are the people you dine with, travel, accommodate, or go for entertainment activities almost every day or week. Most of us are aware of this fact but eventually tend to forget or neglect these small details in our busy schedule. This is where apps like Settle Up step in to track, manage and remind you about them.

Most of the expenses tracking apps just monitor expenses at individual level but Settle Up is a really unique and effective approach for monitoring and settling expenses between 2 or more people. With Settle Up you can create multiple groups for example: roommates (to settle expense between roommates), colleagues (to share your lunch, dinner or other expenses) and so on. Each group gives you the ability to assign new people, add a different currency, and option to sync and backup your group online using your Google account.

Once you have created groups and added people to them, you will find four basic options in each group – New payment, who should pay, payment log and settle debts. Suppose you or one of you’re the group member makes a payment of $200 for dinner, which will be shared by all friends. Then you can quickly navigate to the new payment section; select the name of the person who paid and for whom. You can individually select or deselect people for whom the payment was made. The currency of payment can be changed while entering details and you can also calculate multiple bills and add them instantly with the calculator accessible from the currency box. Though there are a couple of default purposes mentioned in the app, you can also add new purposes which will also get added automatically to the default drop down menu for quick addition in future. Friends also pay debts and that’s where you can add the purpose as debt settlement and the debt of the payer will be reduced by the amount paid.

Based on the expenses made the app calculates which person has to pay how much and to whom. Instead of complex calculations, it cuts short the process of settlement into few simple steps. These steps are mentioned in the settle debts section. Anyone can view the detailed payment logs which show each transaction made between group members.

You can create local groups and invite new people to join it or yourself join an online group if you have already been invited to it. New people can be added from your phone contacts along with their respective Google accounts. The app also includes few settings to deal with both local and online transactions in the settings menu, where you can choose the default language for the group, choose sync frequency, edit notification settings for payments added/changed/deleted by other group members. There’s also a feature named transaction tolerance which allows you to eliminate transaction of value less than specified. For example transactions of less than $1 value will not be counted, because usually nobody cares about it, but if you want absolutely precise calculations keep the tolerance to $0.00.

Settle Up is definitely a useful and one of its kind apps available on the market. Settle Up will help you deal more effectively with expenses made in group of people in a much simple and managed way at the same time saving your time and effort in calculations and reminding others about their due. Settle Up is available in both paid and fully featured free (Ad-supported) version which puts you at no risk of losing money before you try the app and know the worth of it. For the kind of job it does Settle Up is an app worth buying.