Beezang grew out of our own needs.
I (Archis) used to track our expenses on a google spreadsheet, courtesy my senior who designed an elaborate spreadsheet which worked perfectly fine. Well, just that there was this occasional problem of bill duplication and the hours you have to spend going through the entries when its time to settle up. And then of course, more often than not we would procrastinate on entering the bills. Plus you could use the spreadsheet only for tracking the expenses I shared with my room mates. But there were other instances when I did split bills with other folks. There was this one instance when a bunch of us had a get together. The get together was fun, but after that we had to start an email thread that went for around 10 mails to figure out who is going to pay whom how much.
Shivul on other hand used a simple note book with his room mates to track expenses. Data entry was super easy. Anyone who paid a common bill or got groceries made an entry in the note book. However, consolidating all expenses was painful. They would spend an hour or so going through the entries, checking if there were any mistakes and then doing the maths.
That’s when it hit us maybe we should try building something that solves this. After all money management shouldn’t be this huge a task. Beezang is still in a very early stage. But our goal is to ultimately build a service that is super easy to use and doesn’t feel like a lot of work.
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.
