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.
For most of us the first experience of sharing a place with room mates comes when we join our first job. There are others who start sharing a place when they join college. While it is a new and exciting experience, it comes with a new set of responsibilities. This is the first time you are on your own. You are earning your own money and paying your own bills.
There are certain common expenses you will be sharing your room mates. Some of them are the apartment rent, maintenance bills, groceries that you buy for the house, common house hold items purchases and maid/cook’s salary if you keep one. By following certain simple protocols you can make your life easier managing all these expenses:
- Apartment Rent: One person has to take up the responsibility of paying the rent on the time. It’s easier to just set up an auto-transfer instruction with the bank settings to transfer the rent at the beginning of the month. The rest of the folks can do the same to transfer their share of rent to the person who paid for the rent. In case, the person who usually pays the rent to the land lord cannot do it for some reasons for a month, she should communicate it to other room mates so someone else can take up the responsibility. Paying your apartment rent on time is one of the key factors that keep your relationship with your landlord cordial.
- Household Items: When you move into a new apartment with room mates you will be buying stuffs like couch, television, beds, curtains so on. These items can be considered as one time expenses. Ideally it’s best if you can minimize common items that are purchased. Stuffs like beds or room curtains, you can probably on personal basis, while other items like common furniture in living room can be made a common purchase. When somebody leaves, you can decide mutually on how much depreciation to apply on the common items and then refund the person’s share accordingly. To find out how much is the depreciated price of the items purchased; you can look it up on online/offline classifieds for similar items.
- Maintenance Bills: It’s really difficult plus it’s unfair for one person to be responsible for taking care of all the bills. In an ideal case, you can just split the responsibility of who is going to pay which bill. But in real life it won’t probably work. Well an ad hoc assignment of who is going to be paying which bill for the month can still work as long one of you takes the lead to ensure that each bill has been taken care of. The person paying the bill should put in the receipt in common file that you guys maintain. (Yeah do maintain a file of all payments made, may help out in future in case of some misunderstandings in future)
- Groceries/Maid Salary/Miscellaneous: These are some other expenses you will be sharing. For groceries, make sure that you do split up the bills fairly. You don’t want your vegan room mate to pay for the Chicken Sausages you guys bought. Also ensure that you keep your personal purchases that you did with the common items separately. Once again, keep receipts of all purchases made for future reference if required.
One thing you must do is keep track of all expenses incurred. When everything is on record, there are fewer chances of conflicts and more time for fun.
We launched the first version of Beezang on August 19,2009. Ever since, on an average we have made one release every week. Some of them you might have observed, some of them you probably missed. Each release was made with the goal to make your experience on Beezang as awesome and as much fun as possible. Sometimes, we realize that a feature or change we introduced ended up confusing you guys. So, we roll them back or reintroduce them in a different modified form. These are the early days of Beezang. We are trying to learn fast and evolve faster.
Stay tuned and thanks a lot for your support.
Cheers
Archis/Shivul
First of all, we would like to thank each one of you who have shared their feedbacks over email, im or on the site. We are trying to implement them as soon as possible. We have introduced three new features and wanted to give you guys brief overview of each one of them
- OpenId Login: Now you can login to Beezang using your Google or Yahoo id. You need not sign up for using Beezang . For the guys, who are feeling a bit uneasy now, relax
. We don’t have access to your password or login details. Your login authentication takes place at the providers i.e. Google’s or Yahoo’s servers only. We have used a third party’s plugin called rpxnow which basically aggregates the authentication APIs of different providers to implement this feature. For those who are curious to know more about OpenId which makes this feature possible, click on http://openid.net/ or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenId
- Simplifying Group Bills: We have done some subtle changes in report group bill page. We have tried to make it easier to make entries of group bills where you split the amount unevenly. Let us take the scenario where Beezang users A, B and C want to split their lunch bill which came out to be 600 bucks. But hey, C didn’t have that Tandoori Chicken as she is a vegeterian, so her share of bill came out to 150 bucks only. Now all you gotta do is click on split unevenly, type in 150 bucks against C and voila, the rest of the amount is equally split between the rest of the members. Ok, now the next improvement that we have done is you can actually type in mathematical expression in the amount fields of group bills . So you don’t have to do any maths while entering a group bill. C always pays 15% of the grocery bill, cool just type in 0.15* (total amount of the bill) and the amount is there across C. While splitting a bill unevenly, you will find a small link saying auto-adjust besides the boxes that you edit. Well, just in case you edited the share of the wrong participant, you can click on auto-adjust and it will split the rest of the amount equally among all other members. We hope you enjoy, adding group bills now
- Share Bills over E-Mail: Now you have control over whether you want to share a bill with friend over email or not. You will find a check box in the Report Group Bill and Report Debt page and its your choice what you would like to do.
There are few more features coming soon. We just wanted to let you know that we hear you . We know there are some basic features missing like deleting bills. We are working on it and delete bills functionality should be up within a week. Keep sharing your thoughts with us.
