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SettleApp - when we want to be equal

Tomas Chlebek
11

Do you often share your expenses with friends and vice versa? One of you will pay for gas, the other for refreshments, the third for the entrance fee. You don't necessarily do this because you want to pay for others, but it's the most efficient. Sooner or later you will get to the point where you would like to clarify who spent the most and who should settle with whom so that the expenses are divided fairly. If you find yourself in such situations and calculating money is a non-trivial matter, the SettleApp application from Czech developers Ondřej Mirtes and Michal Langmajer could make your life more efficient.

It is one of those that have quite effectively adopted the iOS 7 environment and therefore looks very clean and minimalistic - even banal and boring, one might want to say. When you open it for the first time, you will only see two tabs at the top of the display (Debts a Transaction) and the button to add items in the lower right corner. A large white area is covered only by a short label indicating what to do.

Entering transactions is quite intuitive - first we write how much (a specific amount) and what (through a few simple icons) was paid, then we determine who paid and who was invited, while the application prompts us from the contact list. In the next step, we are back on the main screen, where we see a list of everyone whose names we mentioned, and for each of them we see a number indicating if the given person owes someone and how much. After swiping from right to left, a menu will appear in which we can either confirm that the given debt has been paid or change its value, after which the person who paid more than the evenly budgeted amount will find himself in the "plus" - as if he paid part of the debt for someone another. Even a calculator could handle such a task relatively easily, SettleApp just gives us a better overview of transactions. The application becomes more interesting when there are more payments and from different people.

Example: Tomáš, Jakub, Lukáš, Marek and Jan are driving together, while Tomáš will cover the expenses for the trip - 150 CZK. So everyone owes him CZK 37,50. Jakub returns CZK 40 to Tomáš, CZK 2,50 from Jan's debt (first in the alphabet) is therefore transferred to Jakub, because he seems to have paid the given part to Tomáš for him. A little later, Jan invites Tomáš and Lukáš to a meal - 100 CZK. His debt to Tomáš will be settled, but Tomáš does not owe Lukáš 12,50 CZK (the meal cost 50 CZK for one, while Lukáš owed only 37,50 CZK) – this debt will be transferred to someone whose deposit did not exceed the money received from others. So SettleApp works in such a way that it manages all the people on the list at once, regardless of who was with whom, where and how much was paid for whom - each item of the list is always in plus or minus within all the others, and after clicking we see who he is in plus and minus towards whom so that after the settlement of all debts, everyone is "at zero".

In the "Transactions" tab, we then have an overview of all entered payments (what was paid by whom and who returned what to whom), which also includes the day when they took place (or were entered). By clicking, we can edit any item, after which all the data associated with it will be adjusted.

It may seem that SettleApp has a problem with the unequal share of debtors in the total amount, but this is not true. The embedding process allows for more than meets the eye. If you're one of those people who likes to try things that are "clickable", we'll find that you can "click" (or perform another type of interaction - such as the "slide" gesture) on practically everything. If we click on when specifying the amount Description, we will find that it is possible to write what we paid for, and thus fill in the information vague icons. When specifying payers and invitees, after selecting names from the contacts for each participant in the transaction, we can independently choose how much debt should accrue to him, we can also include ourselves among the "invited", thus avoiding the problem of having to calculate how much of the total the amounts belong to us. Perhaps the only other conceivable option is to choose multi-payer, after which the vast majority (if not all) transactions in the group of friends in progress would be covered.

SettleApp is a bit deceiving with the body. While it looks like a very simple, even banal tool, inquisitive users will discover quite wide options that cover well what the application of the given focus could enable. The only possible complaint can be that the full functionality of the application is implicit - for many, the useful instructions were certainly more comprehensive than the simple note that appears after the first launch. What appears simple is often due to masterful execution - this insight is applicable here, although it must be added that even minimalism can go too far.

[app url=”https://itunes.apple.com/cz/app/settleapp-track-settle-up/id757244889?mt=8″]

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