Goodbye Excel and Google Sheets, this popular app is my new go-to expense manager for trips

Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets were my usual go-to solutions for planning and splitting holiday expenses with my friends and family. For years, I’ve struggled with maintaining complicated expense sheets, grappling with complicated formulas, and ensuring everyone contributes to adding and updating data. For a writer who is not a math genius by a far stretch, this certainly wasn’t the wisest way to go about managing holiday budgets. Add to that the awkwardness of repeatedly pointing out unpaid dues to people. Needless to say, I was dreading having to go through the whole ordeal before an all-girls trip to Dubai. Then I chanced upon an app that saved me both the mental hassle of doing math and the embarrassment of asking people to settle up — Splitwise.

Many of you may have already heard about Splitwise or used the app, but I had never looked beyond the conventional spreadsheet until that trip. As I prepared for my journey, I quickly realized that managing expenses for all eight of us would be a challenge. With multiple friends picking up different activities, meals, and experiences, I felt the need for a better way to track everything. I started out using Excel, thinking it would help me keep things organized. But let me be honest: my spreadsheet skills are pretty basic at best. As I tried to input the experiences I had already booked and paid for to calculate who owed me what, it became clear to me that I was in over my head.

Splitwise made everything simple with its genius features. I can safely say it’s one of the best apps I have ever used. It is designed specifically for splitting expenses, and it felt like a game changer. Unlike Excel or Sheets, which I was trying to navigate on my phone (and let’s just say the mobile app is a nightmare), Splitwise is intuitive and user-friendly. I didn’t want to be tied to a desktop version of anything; I needed something I could easily access on the go.

My favorite Splitwise features

As soon as I started adding expenses in Splitwise, I appreciated how it automatically calculated balances. No more mental math stress! I could simply create a list of people from my contacts and input who paid for what, and the app did all the heavy lifting. It also made settling up incredibly easy; if someone owed me money, Splitwise would send a reminder or give you the option to send one manually, so I didn’t have to awkwardly ask.

Moreover, you can add notes, images, and PDFs of physical receipts when adding an expense. The app auto-assigned icons to our expenses based on the type, and I could also manually select an icon of my choice. While creating an expense entry, you can specify if you want to split an expense equally or if you’ve paid for the whole thing and how much the other people in a group owe you. Have a more complicated split? You get options to divvy up an amount in percentages.

Another highlight was the automatic currency conversion. We were in Dubai, and keeping track of the dirham against our home currency could have been a headache, but Splitwise handled it seamlessly. This feature alone saved me so much time and mental fatigue.

The downside, because of course there’s one

Of course, Splitwise only works if the people you’re splitting expenses with also download the app. Otherwise, you’re back to square one, explaining where the money was spent and reminding people to settle up.

Another issue with using Splitwise — and this is a major one — is that to enjoy all its features, you need to subscribe to Splitwise Pro, which costs $5/month, a tad expensive if you don’t use it frequently. The free version of the app only lets you add three expenses before requiring you to see an ad. If you have a long list of expenses and don’t want to cough up the cash for a Pro account, you’ll have to put up with annoying wait times while ads play out before you can add new entries.

I soon realized that Splitwise is something I can also use outside of my travels. When I brought the app up to my colleague, she told me that her family uses it to split monthly expenses for an elderly parent. There’s a feature in the app that allows specifically for family expense sharing and time-based sharing. I don’t have a similar situation, but it’s good to know I have the app should a similar use case arise.

I know Splitwise doesn’t offer the same level of customization as Excel or Google Sheets, but it’s straightforward and makes budgeting for dummies so much easier. In fact, once you’ve created an expense list, you can export it as a spreadsheet. Thanks to the app, I could focus on enjoying our trip rather than maintaining spreadsheets, and by the end of our Dubai adventure, my friends and I were grateful to have found a solution that simplified our financial interactions, letting us fully enjoy our time together without the burden of complex calculations.