Introducing SmartSplit!

Overview

SmartSplit is a platform that helps you split your bills with your friends. Not dissimilar to applications like SplitWise, Beam (australian only), and many others, it aims to simplify the act of splitting expenses in various groups, whether it be a holiday with friends or family, or for sharing household bills and other expenses. There are a number of unique scenarios that other applications don’t handle, or charge for that felt like easily solvable painpoints.

I started to build this for an immediate need to split expenses for an upcoming family holiday, with expenses being incurred in various currencies, and high volume of transactions daily. It presented a good opportunity to play with building and deploying a service from scratch, and building out an interface for both web and mobile. As I’m not a developer and am really hacking this together, I am also heavily leveraging the new age AI tools such as Cursor to help build this out.

Other applications

There are two main applications that I have used previously in this space, Splitwise and Beem.

Splitwise

I’ve used Splitwise for a number of years and it’s a great service, however they have started to paywall some of the more core functionality, like restricting the numbers of transactions to four per day, and charting/converting balances to a single currency are all paid functions.

Beem

Beem was good although a little clunky when I used it last, and allowed direct payment to settle the balances, however it was very Australian focused, and I haven’t really revisited it after I stopped using the Beem app in general. Beem was previously a great solution to automating transactions to satisfy bank account bonus interest requirements, but that was shortlived.

Points of difference

So what makes SmartSplit different? I’m not going to go all out and say that SmartSplit will be completely free with an exhaustive list of added functionality. However, my wishlist of functionality to have built in and working includes:

• Automatic handling of multiple currencies, with user’s being able to set default currencies to view balances in.
• Linking of users, to allow couples to share finances within a group for balance and settlement purposes, but still be able to split the bills between individuals.
• Group analytics, including breakdowns of categories, balances, etc.
• Ability to pull in transactions from bank accounts and credit cards, and automatically split them into groups to avoid having to manually enter them.
• Facilitate direct payment to settle balances, and automatic transaction creation to settle balances. (Still unsure how this would work internationally)

The tech-stack

The application is built and hostedusing:

• Expo for the frontend web & mobile application
• Supabase for the backend database and authentication
• Vercel for the frontend web application
• EAS for the mobile application
• GitHub for the code repository

Current state

Over the past weekend, I have managed to get the core application running, and have a number of features working already including the multicurrency support, linking of users (although currently at a profile level, not on a group by group basis), and customised splitting options are all working. There is a number of bugs, and the interface is very rough around the edges still, especially on mobile.

SmartSplit’s Web Interface in Dark Mode

I have built and deployed the initial mobile version to Apple’s TestFlight, and have been testing it out lightly.

I will write a bit more about the actual operation of SplitSmart, and some of the challenges I have faced so far.