Shared Groups and labels

Hey all, lots of changes to groups, which we hope would improve your experience managing your various bills among different groups.

Not forced to create groups

We know that you do not always pay bills in groups, or in the same groups. While upgrading the groups experience, we made sure that we continue NOT to force you to create groups. We want groups to help and not hinder your bill sharing experience.

After this upgrade, you would still add your friends and see your total debt with an individual friend - this has not changed.

For existing groups

Groups are now shared and visible to all of its members: so when one person creates a group, everyone in that group would be able to see or make changes to that group, and also see its related bills. When someone is added to a group, they also get a nice email notifying them that they were added.

If you go to your my groups page, you would see your groups as well as your friends' groups (that involves you). We tried to make this upgraded experience as seamless as possible, but since this is a new behavior, there may be a few overlaps between the groups that you created and those that are created by your friends. If this is the case, group creators can click on a group and choose "delete group" to clean up any duplicates.

Group details page

The group details page also had a few additions: all members are now able to edit a group: like adding new members, or modifying the existing members.

There is also a preference setting called "show this group in the list...". If this checkbox is checked, this group would be available for you to pick when you are adding a participant to a shared bill. Currently, this preference is unchecked for all existing groups created by your friends so that those who don't care so much about groups would not be affected by this upgrade.

Labels

We've pushed out a first release of "labels". You can now label your bills to help you organize your various expenditures.

How to label:

• When you add a group to a shared bill, the bill would be automatically labelled with that group.
• OR you can add or delete labels in the labels dropdown button on the top right of each transaction.

What labels provide:

• Quick sharing: A bill that is labelled to a group would be visible to that group (and its members). For example, if I want to share my gas bill with my "ski trip 2012" group, I can add the label that transaction with "ski trip 2012"
• Quick organization: ability to filter, and find bills by labels quickly.  Currently, labels is only available for groups, and you can see the bills labelled with your group in your group details page.

Wow that's a long post - props to those who endured the whole way. Hope that helps,

-Billsup team