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Please join us for occasional updates and information.  Feel free to tweet comments, suggestions, questions and ideas.  See you on Twitter!

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New Fixes and Features on Billmonk

Hey Billmonk friends!  We’ve been a little quiet on the blog because we’ve been listening closely to your suggestions and requests.

Today, we’re happy to let you know our product and engineering team has fixed over two dozen bugs.  We worked on the Amazon library, text related issues, automated email and errors related to reporting payments.

We also added a number of features you requested.  You can now tag library items, have a percentage option in a bill split, convert shared bills into itemized bills and disable debt shuffling for yourself.

The number of Billmonk users has grown quickly beyond what we expected, so we’ve a hired a manager to take care of things on the product front.  You can also look forward to email customer support and a fancier Facebook widget in a couple of months.

The original Billmonk was great, but the future Billmonk is going to be positively grand!

We really appreciate all the suggestions and requests you’ve shared with us and as always, please contact us with any issues or ideas.

Tweaks to Debt Shuffling

Gosh! Who would have thought debt shuffling would be such a hot topic? Thank you all for the wonderful feedback. We love to hear how to make BillMonk better, and are writing to tell you that we listened to your comments and did just that.

With the new changes, everything on the site will look the same, but the final results from each shuffle should be closer to what you expect.

To explain what we did, let’s talk about the different things you can optimize for when you’re shuffling debts:

1. The number of checks left to write after the shuffle (you want this number of be low).
2. Who the remaining checks need to be written to (it’s easier write checks to people you see often).
3. The dollar amount of the checks you have to write (smaller is better).

When we launched, we optimized for (1) and (2). We thought the convenience of settling up with people you see the most would be worth it even if the amounts of those checks were a little larger.

Thanks to your feedback, though, we’ve learned that (3) is more important than (2), so we’ve updated BillMonk to settle debts the way you like.

If you’re happy with the debt shuffles you’ve already created, then by all means stick with them! But if you tried it and didn’t like the numbers you saw, delete your existing shuffles and give it another shot.

Debt Shuffling

Today is an exciting day: we’re launching what has been our most-requested feature for a long time. We’re calling it “debt shuffling,” but it’s best explained with an example. Say this is you and your friends:

The arrows mean “owes money to.” There are only seven friends here, but they will have to write 21 checks to settle up!

Enter debt shuffling. Any one of these people can click the “shuffle debt” button, which will take you to a screen like this:

The monk will think of a way to reduce the number of checks you have to write to settle up. This debt shuffle will take the complicated graph above and turn it into this!

We go the extra mile when we’re proposing a debt shuffle by paying attention to how many bills you’ve split with each person in the group (and how recently those bills happened). If you split bills with some people more often than others, you probably see them more often, and those are the people it will be easiest to settle up with.

We were thinking hard about privacy as we were developing this feature. How do we make it useful without giving away information about your private debts? Here’s what we came up with. You get to see the effects of the debt shuffle on you (that’s the “before” and “after” display above). You also get to see how the money was shuffled around (that’s the “Check the math” section above) — this lets you verify that the debt shuffle was fair. What you don’t get to see are the balances between your friends before or after the shuffle.

We really hope you enjoy this feature as much as we’ve enjoyed developing it! Debt shuffling takes the convenience of BillMonk’s “social money” concept to the next level.

A shiny new look – with graphs!

We took the monk to the salon, where, at the hands of our intrepid graphics designer Christina, he received a long-awaited and much anticipated makeover. I dare say, he now looks simply dashing!

While the most obvious changes are the look-and-feel (different color scheme, new page templates, snazzy logo), we also updated the navigation by adding a left navigation bar, and merged the “friends” page into the “home” page.

As a bonus feature, Scott pulled a tactical ninja stunt and added graphs to the home page. In addition to adding more pretty colors to the site, it also makes it easy to visualize the proportion of debt.

Please let us know what you think! We’re sure to make minor adjustments in the weeks to come.

Geeking with the ReviewMonk

We are a big fan of code reviews at the BillMonk office, they are a good way to help find early bugs in our software and learn to write better code. We also use Subversion to store our source code, but could never find a good code reviewing tool that fit our needs — so we wrote our own! And since BillMonk is built on open source software, we thought it would be nice to give back. So if you’re also a geek, and have a need for a code reviewing tool, check out ReviewMonk at billmonk.com/geek or go directly to the SourceForge page.

BillMonk on Facebook!

We have some great news for all you avid Facebook users: BillMonk is now available as a Facebook app! If you’re wondering what this means, a couple of weeks ago, Facebook made it possible for developers to write applications that run seamlessly within their website. Needless to say, this was a great opportunity to bring BillMonk to Facebook users and help them solve their bill-splitting woes.

With the BillMonk app, you can report bills with Facebook friends, view your balance, and more without ever having to leave Facebook. You can also opt to receive BillMonk messages for things like new bills, as notifications to your Facebook account.

We don’t have all BillMonk features enabled in the application yet, but we will be moving them over in the coming weeks. In the meantime, click here to install the app!

Introducing Itemized Bills!

Shared bills are great when everyone’s share is roughly equal, but have you ever been out with your friend who got the T-bone steak compared to your Caesar Salad? We have too.

You can now enter itemized bills into BillMonk! Just take your receipt home with you and enter all the items individually. Then tell us who owes what for each item, and we’ll do all the math. You can even enter the tax and tip you paid for the bill, and we’ll divide it up fairly.

New SMS features

BillMonk’s SMS interface has gotten a revamp! This update contains a bunch of new features that work together to make the SMS interface a lot more useful.

• Dynamic groups
  SMS commands that take groups (like “victim” and “shared bill”) will now let you specify the list of participants explicitly. Instead of setting up a group on the website with a name like “LunchMoney,” you can specify a list of people like “joe,jon,bob.” For each person, we’ll search the names and contact info of all your friends — so for example, “joe” could refer to joe@example.com, as long as you don’t have any other friends with “joe” as a name or email address. Social groups are always changing, and this feature helps accommodate that fact. Of course, you can still use static groups if that works for you.
• Smart victim choosing
  We already have a victim feature that will tell you who should pick up the next tab. Right now it works by seeing who owes the most within a group of friends. That works alright, but it turns out we can give you a better answer if we know the amount of the bill you are paying. So now you can optionally tell the “victim” command the amount of the bill, and we’ll give you an even better answer for who should pay that bill. You can read more about the details of victim choosing in the FAQ.
• New ‘choose’ command
  This is a new command that combines the power of Smart Victim Choosing and Dynamic Groups. In a single command, you can say:
  
  If you SMS this to BillMonk, we’ll choose the best victim and record that they paid a $25.31 bill. Then we’ll SMS you back a message that says who should pay. It’s one easy step for victim choosing and recording a shared bill — perfect for lunch outings when you don’t know who should pay!

All of this is documented on the newly redesigned Mobile Phone page

Repeating Bills are Here!

BillMonk now allows you enter bills that repeat on a weekly or monthly basis. Simply tell us what day it repeats on (e.g. ‘Thursday’ if weekly, or ‘the 1st’ if monthly), and the bill will automatically be recorded on a regular schedule.

Roommates will especially love this feature for helping to track rent and utilities, but it’s also ideal for a ton of other activities like managing club dues or remembering to pay the dog-walker.

Specify how this bill should repeat when you create it.

 

View all your repeating bills, including when they last occurred, and when they will repeat next.