Boomtrends

BillMonk: Get Your Stuff Back

As I mentioned in the last update (which was way too long ago), things are a bit hectic. I’m looking forward to adding a new section on the site to share just what I mean in the near future. In the meantime, please excuse the plain Wordpress template while we migrate Boomtrends to the new site. Also, as I mentioned we are looking for guest contributors to Boomtrends. Today’s post is from Apurva…enjoy!

If you’re like me, you have trouble remembering things like: Do I owe anyone money? Do they owe me anything? I remember lending Freakonomics to someone, but who? I have Entourage Season 1, but who did I borrow it from? For questions like this, BillMonk provides a great little utility.

Their goal is to “…defuse the financial tensions between friends by providing a tool that manages social money in a way that is easy and fair. Use BillMonk when you need to track money and there isn’t a better way.”

Or, as Hamlet put it, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be, for loan oft loses both itself and friend.” Um. let’s just move on.

To start, you can add your friends via your Facebook account, an excel spreadsheet, or manually with email addresses. Your friends don’t even have to go through the setup process to get an account. If they choose not to, they’ll receive an email message or text message whenever you mention them in your account.

The site itself provides two unique tools. First, it allows you to track who owes you money, and whom you owe money to. If your friends have accounts, whenever one of you makes an entry mentioning the other in a transaction, the information will be shown in your view. To settle these transactions, you can either pay them in person (duh), or you can sign up for an Obopay account (who coincidentally just bought out BillMonk). Once you have your bank account linked to Obopay, you just click on the amount you owe someone and the money will be transferred. Conversely, if someone owes you money, the amount will show up in your account. Of course there’s a service charge for all this: 10 cents to send money and 1.5% to load cash into your account.

I like the way BillMonk keeps track of all of the various transactions a user has with different people, and the current amount owed at any given time. For instance, if I buy dinner for Rob and we decide to split the $100 bill, and later I owe him $8 for coffee, BillMonk knows that he only owes me a total of $42. When I tell BillMonk that he’s paid me $20, it automatically lowers the amount owed to me to $22.

Although not really a part of the site, Obopay also offers a mobile service that lets you transfer money to your friends through your cell phone via SMS messaging. While I haven’t used this feature yet, I think it has some far-reaching potential. How often do you go to dinner and there’s someone who didn’t bring enough money, so they offer up their credit card, while most of the other people are looking for change because they only have 20 dollar bills?

Using Obopay’s mobile service (or even PayPal’s mobile service), you could easily settle bills right at the table just with a simple text message. For the user who chooses to manage all of his money and transactions through BillMonk, it’s an easy process to download transaction history from Quicken or any other utility that enables CSV functionality. It even provides the capability to ‘tag’ your expenses for easier historical navigation.

While the payment feature is the most popular feature of this site, BillMonk also allows users to set up libraries of all the ’stuff’ they have, focusing primarily on books and DVDs. Using this feature, you can browse your friends’ libraries and ‘check-out’ and ‘check-in’ stuff. The process of going through your actual libraries and inputting them manually is a bit tedious, but it is cool to see what all your other friends have. Instead of rushing out to buy something, you could just as easily find a friend of yours that has it and is willing to lend it out to you.

Now, admittedly, this may seem like a lot of work to keep track of your money and things, and it probably is overkill for easygoing people who are good about paying people back and remembering who has their stuff, but if you have a forgetful set of friends, BillMonk might just be what you’re looking for. As for me, though, I still have no idea who I borrowed Entourage from.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 at 12:57 am and is filed under social networking, money, Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.