Track which friends owe you money and why
SplitLog is a minimal expense tracker for friend groups that logs who paid for what, why, and settles debts with a single tap.
Illustration: Receipt-splitting interface concept
For anyone who has ever been part of a group dinner, a shared road trip, or a weekend rental, the post-event accounting is a familiar pain. Screenshots of Venmo transactions pile up, spreadsheets get lost in Google Drive graveyards, and someone always ends up paying twice. This is the problem that SplitLog aims to solve — by turning the process into a single tap.
The app, which launched in private beta last month, lets users snap a photo of a receipt, tag the friends who were present, and automatically calculates each person's share. Over the course of February, our test group of four friends — Alice, Bob, Carol, and Dave — logged 4:expenses totaling $:147. The largest single expense was Carol's group grocery run for a weekend trip, which came to $:60 split four ways.
In practice, the system works like this: Alice pays for dinner, uploads the receipt, and tags the three others. SplitLog divides the total equally — in this case, $:48 split among four people, meaning each owes Alice $:12. Bob later covers a taxi from a concert, and the app adjusts balances accordingly. After four such events, the net balances are calculated automatically.
The real magic happens at month-end. Instead of a chaotic list of IOUs, SplitLog generates a simple settlement plan. For our test group, the algorithm determined that Alice should pay Bob $2, Carol should pay Alice $8, and Dave should pay Alice $5.75 — a total of three transactions to settle all debts. This is a stark contrast to the typical approach, which an industry analyst described as “screenshot-based Venmo archaeology.”
The simplicity has drawn interest from groups beyond college roommates. “We've seen adoption among small sports teams, book clubs, and even co-working spaces,” said a spokesperson for SplitLog. The company plans to introduce a “group wallet” feature later this year, where members can pre-load funds and avoid any post-event transfers altogether.
For now, the app remains focused on its core loop: snap, split, settle. The test group reported that the entire month-end reconciliation took less than two minutes — a far cry from the hour-long spreadsheet sessions of the past. As one user put it, “I can finally focus on enjoying the meal instead of doing mental math.”