Now live on Splitwise (and within your Splitwise iPhone or Android app) is a big update to our favorite little Splitwise feature: Quick-Add. This feature makes it really easy to add in new shared expenses, payments, loans, and IOUs!
Modeled after the Google Calendar “Quick-Add”, our Quick-Add system lets you add things easily into your Splitwise group without having to open up a dialog box and make lots of clicks. While we’ve had a Quick-Add system since our original April 2011 launch, we’ve made a big update to the code which now includes support for more natural English phrases, such as “I loaned Ryan $50 at Cambridge Common,” or “I owe Ryan 2000 dollars for repeat massages”, or “Ryan bought a hamster for $39.95.”
This update is especially useful on the iPhone and Android, because you can use the native voice-recognition on your keyboard to speak a payment phrase into the Quick-Add text field. It also is the easiest way to input expenses that other people paid for (instead of having to load the form for “detailed expense.”)
Before Splitwise, we used to keep track of bills in a Google document, like many of our early adopting users. None of the existing IOU apps and solutions seemed better than a spreadsheet, in part because all the existing services took a lot more time than a spreadsheet to input a bill. There was too much clicking required and too many fields to fill-in.
Quick-Add is part of our answer to keeping cost-sharing as quick as a spreadsheet: a way to type in what you mean without taking your fingers off the keyboard.
Please, let us know how you like the new quick-add so we can improve it for you! We’re able to make improvements to the system very quickly, because we process the quick-add syntax on the server (translation: you don’t need to update your mobile app to get the benefit of the new feature).
Last but not least: if you want to help translate Quick-Add into your language, please send us an email!
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