Friday, August 31, 2012

You've got a friend in Billsup

As most of you may have noticed, this week has been a crazy week here at Billsup: it may just be an all-time highest number of feature updates in a week for a long while. We started the week off with Summary with Charts, then it was shared bill updates with taxes & tips, and now we've made enhancement to Friends.

As a side note, I just wanted to mention our commitment to you, our users: we plan to keep this site alive and running as smoothly and consistently as we possibly can. As the number of users increase, we will be upgrading servers, adding features, and listening to your feedback. If the site goes down or an error occurs, it's likely that we're actually upgrading our servers or services. Thanks again for your patience and adopting Billsup so early in the game.

Pick your friends from a list!

As you play around with the updated site, you'd find that adding friends/items on bills has been improved: you can now just pick your friend from a list when you add bills/debts/payments :) simply click on the down arrow to select one of your friends.


Let us know if that works well for you. It may take some time for your friend list to get populated, if you find friends missing in your list, simply navigate to your "My friends" page and it should update automatically.

See details of your friend

In case you didn't notice, you can click on a friend's name (under participants) to see your relation with that friend in any bill. Simply click on the friend's name in a shared bill, debt, or payment and you would be able to see your detailed relation with your friend.



Help spread the word

You can now add/invite your friends using our invite page! Enter comma-separated emails and we'll send them a nice invitation email.

Send us bug reports if you find anything strange.

Thanks guys! What a great way to end the month of August! Happy friday and enjoy the updates! 
Billsup team



Wednesday, August 29, 2012

taxes & tips, summary, and easier split

It's pretty common for different people to order different things at restaurants: some get drinks, some get deserts, and some get bigger entries (or even two!). As many of you know, our shared bills already support multiple items. If only Mary and John had drinks, you may specify each item and their share so only they should pay for it.

Taxes and Tips


Many of you like the fact that we support itemized bills, and some have requested the support for "taxes and tips".  If you're in a country where taxes or tips are necessary, this new feature would split the taxes and tips amounts proportionally to each person's share on the rest of the bill.

To use this new feature, click on the "add taxes and tips" when editing a shared bill.


Once you enter the taxes and tips amounts, each person's share would be automatically calculated for you.
The back-end calculations are not too simple, and although you shouldn't run into issues, let us know if you think you've found a bug.

Bill Summary

Many a-times you may want to know each person's share or what impact a bill has on each person. We're happy to announce the "bill summary" feature that displays the summary of each person for shared bills.

You would be able to view the share of each person, how much they paid, and how much net effect of the bill on each person.
This summary panel is located at the bottom of each shared bill. As well, "settle details" have been moved to this section as well.

Splitting costs

We've also made it easier to specify the share of each person, with fewer clicks and more options. When you change the "split" within a shared bill, you would now see something like this:

You can select who's involved with the check boxes on the left (as before). We have changed the options for splitting to include Even x 2 and Even x 3, for those who may be paying for others. What that basically means is that a person specified to split "evenly x 2" would share twice as much as a person specified to split "evenly". You can see this in the example above where Mary's share is twice as much as Tom's.

We have also taken out "custom percentage" to simplify the plans we have for this feature ahead. Custom amounts are still available, and the percentages are still there to help you see each person's share as a percentage.

As you can tell, we're working very hard to push out features to please you guys. Hopefully this has been helpful. Let us know if you run into issues.

Happy splitting!
-Billsup team

Monday, August 27, 2012

Summary with charts!

Today we're rolling out a well-requested feature of summarizing the total amount of debts between you and all your mates. In addition, we've added pretty charts for your visual pleasure.



You can see these new features in the "My friends" page. Hope you like it!

Other updates

  • We have finished upgrading our mail servers and notifications should be working again! Let us know if it's not working for you.
  • We've fixed a couple minor bugs in this release. Please report issues you find by contacting us.

Cheers,
-Billsup team

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Debt Transfer

We're excited to announce a feature we call "debt transfer". Some of you from Billmonk might know it as "debt shuffle" - basically we use an algorithm to reduce the number of payments you need to settle up with your friends. We make sure that you or your friends don't lose money in the process.


Example

After many shared bills and debts between your friends, your debt relationship may look something like this:


In this example, these friends would require 18 payments to settle up with each other. With Billsup, we can figure out how to settle up these debts easily without anyone losing any money. Using "debt transfer" to shuffle money around, Billsup optimizes for the minimum number of transactions to settle up while keeping the payment amounts as low as possible, turning the above graph into something like this:

After the debt transfer, these friends only require 4 payments to settle up with each other! How cool is that!


Usage

To perform a debt transfer, you or your friends could go to your "My friends" page after logging in, and choose the "Transfer Debt" option on the top right, which would take you to the "transfer debts" page below.

Once there, select friends that know each other, and click on Analyze to see if a debt transfer can reduce the number of settlements required for your group! As well, you would be able to see how many more friends you would be even with if you choose to proceed. (If you choose friends that don't know each other, they may have to settle up with strangers, so be careful!) 

Once saved, each participant can view the debt transfer, which looks something like the screenshot below.


In detail, this page shows:

  • who was involved in the transfer
  • the effect of the transfer
    • e.g. here the number of payments required for the group has been reduced by 8!
  • at the top you can see how money flowed around to create this debt transfer for you. You can verify that the money transferred in and out from your account actually balances out:
    • i.e. sum of the money transferred from you  = sum of the money transferred to you

Try it out and let us know if how it works out for you.

What's next?

Do you guys need a Billmonk importer? Let us know. If you think you do, send us your billmonk xml files to info@billsup.com and help us create an importer for you!

-Billsup team

Monday, August 13, 2012

Email notifications may be affected

Hey all,

Warm welcome to all our new users!

In fact, our email servers got a little overwhelmed by you guys these couple days that it is forcing us to move or upgrade. Today we were actually going to make some progress on a feature that starts with "de" and ends with "uffle", but instead we've been battling a "you've reached your mail sending limit" messages all day. So, we're exploring where to move, and trying to keep our mail servers alive. If you have ideas or connections, let us know.

Meanwhile, you may experience some delays (or lost) notification emails - sorry about that! For those who may be waiting on an activation link for the sign-up process, we do encourage you to use Google or Facebook login - it's easy and fast!

Having said this, your bill adding and tracking experience should not be affected. Do let us know if you find a problem - info@billsup.com or the contact us form.

Thanks for your patience,
Billsup team


Friday, August 10, 2012

Happy 1 month!

Can you believe it has only been one month since our public beta launch? That's right, we launched on July 10th, but it sure feels longer than that on our end (maybe we've been working too hard and need a vacation?).

Here is what we've been able to accomplish so far:

  • Debts with Friends
    • Debt Summary - easily see who owes how much on one screen
    • Basic Groups
  • Tracking bills
    • Record shared bills, debts, payments
    • Bill copying
    • Basic bill searching
    • Multiple currency support
  • Login using Facebook or Google
  • Mobile
Just wanted to say THANK YOU to everyone who has signed up and tried Billsup. You are the early adopters of our product, and we sure hope you like it. From here on, it's just going to get better. We're so excited for the many upcoming features and improvements planned, so stay with us! Feel free to send us feedback or suggestions, we do listen!

Here is how YOU can help:
Thanks again for supporting us,
Billsup Team

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Bill search & Bill copying

You suggested, we're delivering :) You said:

  • "Search transactions -- can be useful."
  • "Search-able transactions, I cant find any right now."
  • "Copying transactions -- this is a simple but very useful feature for those recurring transactions"

Basic transaction searching

We have just pushed an update that supports basic searching for transactions (bills, payments, debts). The search box is available in your list of bills and also in the friends details page. Currently, you can search using the name (aka purpose) of the transaction. We will be adding more search options if more users request it :)


Bill copying

We understand that sometimes there are bills or debts that are similar or even identical. Well, we have just pushed out the option to copy a bill, debt, or a payment. Simply hit "Copy" button (next to Edit) to copy the details, modify it as you wish, and hit Save.

Keep those suggestions coming. We're looking through various feedback and there's tons to work on. We want to build a tool that YOU the users would find helpful. If you have feedback, feel free to contact us.

Billsup Team

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Adding Debts

Everyone might have come across countless situations where they might have loaned some money to their friends or acquaintances or in other cases received a loan from someone and simply forgot about it. Billsup can help you organize these loans/debts just like shared bills. Here’s how you can do it:
Click on New Debt menu item from the options bar after you have logged in:



You would end up in the page shown below:



Fill up the purpose, which by the way is optional, to indicate what this debt or loan is about then in the details section select the appropriate option for what happened, if you loaned to someone else you select “Someone owes me money” and if you owe someone else select “I owe someone money”, fill out the details of the person with whom you had the interaction, the amount with the correct currency, the date and any additional notes for example how you wish to settle the debt later. Click on save and this transaction would show up on the My Friends page.

So there you go you have one less item to track.
Billsup team.