Splits

We built Splits — and here’s what we did that Splitwise doesn’t

By Expensely Team··7 min read

We just shipped Splits — a Splitwise-style feature inside Expensely that lets you track shared expenses with friends, roommates, trip groups, and couples. We've resisted building this for a long time because Splitwise is genuinely good at what it does and we didn't want to ship a worse version. So this post is the honest answer to two questions: why we built it anyway, and what we did that's actually different from Splitwise.

Why Splitwise alone wasn't enough

Splitwise solves one job well: keeping a fair ledger of who owes whom. Open the app, add a $120 dinner, split it 4 ways, see balances. That's a complete, satisfying flow — and it's why Splitwise has survived ten years of competitors. We use it. Our friends use it. It works.

But the moment the trip ends and you open your real expense tracker, the Splitwise data is gone. Your $30 dinner share doesn't show up in "Food". The $400 you paid for an Airbnb that three friends paid you back for doesn't net out to $100 in "Travel". Your monthly category breakdown is Swiss cheese, and you don't know it until tax season.

Splitwise tracks who owes whom. It doesn't track what you spent. Most people don't realise these are different jobs until they try to do their taxes.

The killer detail: shares become real transactions

In Expensely, when you log a shared expense — "$120 dinner, split 4 ways" — we do two things:

Delete the shared expense and we delete the linked transaction. Edit the split and we edit the share. Your month-end Food category is finally honest — it includes the dinners you split, not just the ones you paid for solo.

What else we did that's different

Five split types, three payer modes

Equal, exact, percent, shares, adjustment — and three payer modes: single payer, multiple payers, or "each paid their own share". The last one is the secret weapon for trips where everyone is paying their own way and you just want a single record of the trip's shared budget.

Per-expense currency with auto-FX

Splitwise lets you set a group default currency. Expensely lets every expense have its own currency and captures the FX rate at the moment of entry. For a Bali trip where you're paying in IDR for taxis, USD for hotels, and AUD for that one weird dinner — this matters.

Receipt OCR and voice entry, for splits too

Splitwise Pro has receipt scanning. Expensely's OCR is available on every plan, including free, and it works inside the split flow. So does voice: "Eight thousand rupees dinner, split with the Bali group, four ways." Speak, confirm, done.

Friends, no group required

Sometimes you don't want a group — you just want to split one dinner with one friend. Expensely has a Friends concept (internally just a hidden 2-person group) so adding a friend by email and splitting with them takes 10 seconds, no group setup.

Splitwise CSV import in 30 seconds

Splitwise lets you export each group as a CSV. We built an importer that reads the CSV, previews every expense, lets you map members to email addresses, and commits the whole group into Expensely with full history. The split type for imported expenses is set to "exact" so the numbers match Splitwise to the cent.

Trip mode and partner mode

Trip-type groups have a date range. While the trip is active, every expense you log auto-prompts: "split this with the Bali group?". At trip end, Expensely suggests settle-ups with the minimum number of transactions.

Couple-type groups default to 50/50 and have an optional cascade mode: if you turn it on, every personal expense you log can be split with your partner with one tap. We treat couples as a first-class group type, not an afterthought.

What we explicitly didn't build (yet)

Pricing

Splits is included in the Solo plan ($7/mo). The free tier gets 1 group, 3 members, and 3 split expenses per day — enough to try it with a roommate. Team plans don't see Splits at all (it's a personal-finance feature, not a business one). See full pricing.

If you want the side-by-side

We wrote an honest, point-by-point comparison: see Expensely vs Splitwise. If you only need a group-expense ledger and nothing else, Splitwise is still a great call. If you want shared expenses AND a real expense tracker in one app, we'd like to be your default.

Related reading

Freelance
How to track expenses as a freelancer (without losing weekends)
You’re a freelancer. You don’t need a CFO — you need a workflow you’ll actually do every week without thinking about it.
Pakistan
Expense tracking for small business in Pakistan: a 2026 guide
If you run a small business in Karachi, Lahore or Islamabad, this is the setup we actually recommend — not a generic listicle.

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