Remember when you had to nag your college roommate Joe to pay his share of the bills? Billshare was started by a young 20-something guy in this exact predicament. Except instead of complaining and cursing under his breath like the rest of us, he actually did something constructive and built a new website to make this process manageable. Billshare is a clever web app designed to help streamline the process of sharing bills. The app allows you to do many things, including dividing bills easily by creating receipts and having Billshare divide the costs, recording all payments, keeping detailed stats on all spending trends, sending out email alerts regarding bills owed, communicating to the group through a common message board, and setting up RSS feeds to be notified when someone has submitted receipts.
"Billshare is free and will always be free. When I started billshare I was living with 3 other roommates and dividing and keeping track of who owed who what was a huge pain. So I wrote a small version of billshare just for the people I was living with. They seemed to like it, and it made all of our lives a lot easier, so I decided to develop it on a much larger scale. Unfortunately, running a website is expensive. I've decided to use google adsense to help cover the costs of running the site. I don't like having the ads, but without them this site wouldn't be possible."
There are millions of college students and people in their 20's who are sharing expenses with roommates and hating every minute of that bill sharing process. This site is a creative and clever response to that reality, and has great potential for partnerships with social networking sites and others that target that 18-30 age range. I was especially keen on the email updates reminding folks of the money they owe --that way, no one has to be the bad guy nagging all the time.
The site is quite impressive given that it is totally created and managed by one young 20-something. But, it still needs help making some of its functions more user-friendly and less work for the user. The site just needs a key partnership from some bigger business that can immediately upload bills onto the site, or something like that, so data input is kept to a minimum. I don't know how that can be done exactly, but i'm sure someone out there in cyberspace does.
