Tracking bills that you split while you are on a trip or travelling with friends can be difficult. In this post, we will walk you through some simple stuffs that you can do using Beezang which will make tracking trip expenses easier.
- Link your twitter id to Beezang. You can learn how to do it here. This will enable you to enter bills via sms. In case you will have internet access and would prefer to enter bills via email, know more on how you can go about entering bills via email here
- So while you are on the go just enter the bills as and when they happen or whenever you are free via sms or email.
- Once you are back, create a group for your trip. Say you went out on a road trip name it “Road Trip” and invite your trip mates too
- All your bills will be in the notes tab.
- Save them as group bill with the group ‘Road Trip’.
- Once you have made sure you have entered all your bills, settle the group and all your friends will be notified how much they owe each other.
And thats all that you have to do. Now you have one less reason to worry about when you are travelling with friends
Last week we released a new feature using which you can send your bills via twitter direct message. The idea was to make it easier for entering bills. Today we release another feature that will make your life easier. Now you can email your bills to bills@beezang.com. Enter the bill details on the subject of the email. Once you have sent the email, your bills will appear on the Notes tab. Next time when you sign in just save the note as appropriate bill type. Turn your email client into a bill entering machine thats fast and easy. We hope you enjoy using this feature
Hi everyone,
Recently we released a new feature of sending you an email with your account summary. The first batch of emails was sent yesterday. Unfortunately we discovered a critical bug due to which some of you might have received incorrect/garbage data. We have fixed this bug. We are sorry for this mistake.
Regards
Team Beezang
Before Beezang, we used a Google Spreadsheet to keep track of our apartment bills. So when we were ready with the first version of Beezang, we started using Beezang. The first thing we did was create a group for our apartment. Then we took the current standings of the group from the spreadsheet and entered it as a group bill into Beezang. As per the latest standings on the spreadsheet, Viru (our roommate) owed me say X and Shivul owed me Y. I created a group bill saying I made a payment of ‘X+Y’ and Viru’s share of the bill was X and Shivul’s ‘Y’. So, if you are using a notebook or a spreadsheet to manage your expenses and want to migrate to Beezang, thats all you need to do to get started.
One of the advantages of using Beezang is you can manage multiple groups. For us there were two groups. The first was the apartment which we shared with another roommate and the other was Beezang itself. We use the second group to keep track of bills related to Beezang that I or Shivul paid for. So we have these two groups “Roommates” and “Beezang”. All apartment related bills go into “Roommates” and all work related into “Beezang”.
Ever since we launched, we had people asking for a feature to track personal bills. Some of you even devised workarounds to track such personal expenses like the money you spent on petrol, your daily pack of cigarettes or eating out. We took our time but it is here finally.
You can now enter your personal bills by clicking on ‘Add Bill‘ tab on your side navigation bar and then clicking ‘Add Personal Expense‘. You can enter the bill by filling in some simple details and assigning a category.
We have added a new tab on the Home Page ‘Personal Expense‘ . This tab shows you a nifty pie chart which gives you an idea about where you have spent your money in the current month. If you want to dig into the details , just click on “More Details” and you will be able to see the data and your spending pattern of the last three months. We hope you find these data useful. Give it a spin and let us know how you feel about it.
Cheers
We got the opportunity to present Beezang at Startup Saturday Bangalore on November 14, 2009. It was attended by over 100 entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs, investors and other startup enthusiasts. You can get a very informative summary of the meet up here
There were some interesting questions regarding our revenue model and user acquisition strategy. Well, we are still evolving and trying to figure out those things. We have some ideas though how we are going to go about it. We also got suggestions to build a iPhone App which makes sense. Its not always possible for people to have access to internet or a desktop. Making entries on the go is an important requirement. Overall, it was a great experience.
Please find below the deck we used.
When you and your friends decide to move in to an apartment, you will have two options. Either you will rent a furnished apartment or take up an unfurnished apartment and buy your own furniture and other essential house hold items. Renting an already furnished apartment has the advantage that you don’t have to bear the hassle of moving your stuffs to a new place when you shift or figuring out how to handle the situation where one or more roommates are moving out. But if you have a good understanding with the people you are moving in and are likely to stay in the same city for say at least a year; it usually comes out more economical to buy your own stuffs. However, this is from our own experience in Bangalore. We are not sure how it works out in other places.
So you and your roommates have decided to buy your own stuffs. Now the next step is how to go about it. It is quite a big move to invest in things for a property and depending on where you purchase the stuff from, can be rather expensive. Some people choose to withdraw money from their savings accounts to fund such a venture. You want to get stuff that is good quality but at the same time obviously you don’t want to break the bank. Before you invest in those items, have a candid discussion and reach an agreement on the following points:-
- Items to buy: Make a list of household items you are going to buy. Some essential items that you will definitely need are beds/cots (you may consider buying some extra cots for guests), chairs, Washing Machine, Refrigerator and a Television Set (You need something to relax after coming home after all)
- Budget: Reach an agreement on the total amount you are going to spend on such items. Research on the internet about the best deals you can get. You will be surprised to discover how the price of same item can vary across multiple dealers.
- What to do when someone leaves: The stuffs you are buying today will not have the same market value one year down the line. Agree among yourselves what should be a fair depreciation you can put on each item when someone leaves and the rest of you folks have to reimburse the person’s share. Some items will have higher depreciation than others. To figure out a fair rate, just go through the classifieds and find out how much the same items fetch in second hand market.
- Personal Items: If there is something that you want to buy for yourself, say like a study table get in our own personal tab.
- Next start shopping
Set up a home, not just a place to live in.
We have refreshed Beezang with a new look and feel. This is as part of our continued efforts to give the best possible experience to our users. This is what had been keeping us busy last few weeks. We have also added the feature via which you can add a transaction directly from the summary tab be it a debt/loan or a group bill. Do let us know how you feel about the new interface.
