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Do you have a roommate? A partner? A friend to whom you’ve loaned money? Buxfer is a fantastic web-based tool for anyone in a situation with shared expenses. The site’s programmers write:
As graduate students, having food almost always meant eating out with a bunch of fellow sufferers somewhere on Craig Street. With such a high rate of accumulating bills, our memories and scraps of paper were just not enough. So we wrote a small simple script to keep track of our debts. And boy, did we love it! Well, we thought maybe the others would find this useful too.
Buxfer allows you to:
- Import bank or credit card statements.
- Keep track of who owes you money.
- Know where you spent your money.
- Set up and manage budgets.
- Access Buxfer via mobile phone.
You can learn more about Buxfer by taking a tour of the site, reading the blog for development updates, or viewing the FAQ to get into the nitty-gritty. Where was this when I was in college? (Oh, right — the whole internet thing hadn’t come of age yet.)
Note: I originally wrote about Buxfer last February at Money Hacks.
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December 12th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
Sounds interesting, but I’m a low-tech guy and generally use pencil and paper for such exercises.
In fact, I’m such a Luddite when it comes to new technology, I just learned the other day that a “plasma screen” is a kind of TV monitor.
I always thought it some type of blood test.
Stay Cheap!
Jeff Yeager
Ultimate Cheapskate
December 12th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
As a drop-in, I’ve never looked at Buxfer (but will now), but I have used a similar service that’s been good to me - Billmonk.com. I’ve lived in a five person row house for the past two and a half years, and it’s worked great. Very simple to use and continues to improve.
It doesn’t have a budget feature to my knowledge, which is intriguing. At any rate, I thought I’d give a competing service that’s been good to me a mention as well. If I don’t get the chance to check out Buxfer, maybe a comparison on here?
December 12th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
The mobile phone access is brilliant. Having it stored somewhere besides little scraps of paper is nice too.
Getting my finances off of post-it notes has helped me more than anything. Organization really should not be as difficult as it is…
December 12th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
At least at first glance, it looks like what Billmonk does, it does better than Buxfer, but Buxfer is overall more versatile.
Buxfer seems to combine Billmonk with Quicken, which is an interesting and likely very useful combination. It also enables one to get alerts on a cell phone when within a certain proximity to one’s budget limit. This can be very useful when sharing bills depending on how you can include them in your budget.
However, the actual process of tracking spending is a little more crude, since it looks like you only have a group pool, rather than individual members exchanging money and splitting bills. Billmonk allows you to form groups between people for ease of data entry, but ultimately each person has a separate account with each person. These can then be shuffled around a group if one desires in order to minimize the payments. Billmonk also has an itemized bill option to break down restaurant tabs or grocery bills, and will divide tax/tip proportionally for you. I’m not sure Buxfer has an analogous feature.
I like the combination with Quicken features, but I just wish the rest of the service was a little more refined.
Of course, if anyone that’s used Buxfer (and/or Billmonk) has any input that would edit mine, please feel free to correct me. I’ve never used Buxfer, just looked at the tour. Cheers!
December 12th, 2007 at 4:24 pm
My girlfriend and I have been using BillMonk for some time, it appears to be a more simple version of Buxfer, without the money management (just an app to track who owes whom money).
Followup to John’s comment: I use Quicken to track Billmonk’s activity, where the balance is reflected in an asset account, which makes it easy for me to reconcile (combined with Billmonk) that the $20 on my credit card for dinner, is really $10 that I spent on ‘dining’ and $10 that gets added to the balance of ‘Girlfriend’ asset account - allowing me to accurately budget. I wrote a post about it here.
December 12th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
JD
Is this a sponsored post? I ask because I want to provide myself a frame of reference as to whether you are recommending the online product/site out of its own merits or whether it’s due to advertising reasons. Both are perfectly fine…but the extra information would be handy.
-Raymond
December 12th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
The closest I’ve come is pimping a friend’s book, like I did yesterday, and I tried to be quite clear that I was an unbiased reviewer…
December 12th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
I have been searching for something like this for a while. I use MS Money for in house, bottom line verification of spending, but I wanted an online version (I am away from home frequently). I have been using Geezeo for a little bit now, and although it is cool, it is sort of a financial / social thing. Although I like it, I like Buxfer much better. I personally won’t be able to get anything out of the group function and, as such, the contact function, but still it is great. Although Geezeo is fun to pass ideas around on and such, and it is very powerful, the Buxfer is a better interface, easier to use, and appears to be a little more ‘adult’ (sorry Geezeo crew).
Billmonk is also very well made and works like a champ, but for my house (married, all expenses soiled into each other) it has very little use.
my 2 cents….
December 13th, 2007 at 2:53 am
Hi
I have used Buxfer to sort out bills with my housemates for a while now. Generally, I find it to be great (especially seeing as it is free!). Two problems I have with it are:
1. It can run a bit slow sometimes
2. As they have added more and more features to it over the months, they have had to modify the interface to accommodate them. This has resulted in it becoming a little clunky to use sometimes.
For debt consolidation (as Buxfer refers to it), I would definitely recommend it.
For managing my personal finances though, I use another free on-line app called Expensr (https://www.expensr.com/). This app doesn’t have the debt consolidation that Buxfer does, but it does allow you to categorise and monitor your spending in quite a detailed way. It also builds graphs based on these categories. I’m going to stop raving about it now otherwise you are all going to think that I’m getting paid to do (I promise I am not).
If anyone has any other free apps that are similar to this, please can you post them because I would really like to see whether they are better than eith Buxfer or Expensr.
Mike
December 13th, 2007 at 8:39 am
Jeff Yeager, I don’t read all the comments on this site, (Although I procrastinate enough to read a lot of them). And I’ve already seen that plasma screen joke. Oh well. I suppose you’ve got just as much right to make repetitive jokes as I have to criticize you for it (which is only as much as J.D. thinks we have). I should be nice, Jeff’s generally are…
December 13th, 2007 at 9:08 am
On topic, I looked through this site some, and it looks useful. I thought maybe it was just a mint with friends, but it doesn’t actually interact with your bank for you, so that can be good. Although, the problem I’ve always had with quicken/MSmoney is that I’ll put a transaction into my pda when I make it, then I sync up with my bank info, and it has a different name (because I don’t refer to the local coffee shop as HIGHER GRNDS #1002 NON PIN) and it never syncs up. I’ll try this when I get a few hours, it would be nice for me and my GF.
December 13th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
Hi all, I am one of the co-founders of Buxfer. J.D.: thanks for writing about us!
@John: with Buxfer, you can choose to maintain pairwise balances with people (even within groups), or you can perform automatic elimination of debt-cycles (A -> B -> C -> A). We call this “debt consolidation” and it can be turned on or off, on a per-group basis.
@Jeffeb3: we do interact with your bank — if you allow us to! We support automatic downloading from about 300 financial institutions. Also, we do detect the kind of duplicates you talk about (when you are importing your statement) — we use the amount and the date to figure out whether a transaction is a dupe or not.
@Mike: yes, we are constantly working on improving performance - the site is actually a lot faster than it was a month ago. Regarding interface clutter, we try so hard to avoid it, but I guess we haven’t been too successful. Could you please let us know where we caused you a headache?
For the billmonk folks, you can actually download your billmonk transactions and import them directly (Import statements -> Shared CSV) within Buxfer — just to see if you like the system
Also, we got a shiny new iPhone interface (http://i.buxfer.com/) which some of you might find very convenient.
December 13th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
I’m using https://www.moneyflickr.com Simple, fast, knows everything!
December 13th, 2007 at 9:02 pm
I kinda liked it before you went “full time” on your blog. 3 posts in 1 day’s a lot to keep up with.
However, I commend you for keeping the quality of posts as high as you can. They’re all very informative. Thanks!
Dr J
December 14th, 2007 at 2:09 am
@Ashwin: Nice to know you are keeping tabs on who’s saying what about your site
Regarding the 2 issues I had with your site, this is probably not the place to be speaking about it so I’ll get hold of you via the “Make a suggestion” page on your site.
If you haven’t heard from me in a few days, just give me a poke using the comments on this page (I’m monitoring new comments so will be notified by email).
M
December 15th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
I was glancing through the blurb that the site’s developers wrote - as soon as I caught “Craig Street” I knew exactly where they were and most of the places they were talking. Thanks for that bit of home to someone who has since moved away from Craig Street.
December 16th, 2007 at 9:13 am
[...] Do you have trouble keeping track of who owes you money or who you owe money? J.D. at Get Rich Slowly shares a tool that will help you track shared bills and expenses. [...]