Splitwise and Zapier: Turn emails into expenses, and more!

We’re excited to announce that Splitwise is now supported by Zapier. This makes it easy to connect Splitwise to the other services you love, and automate certain workflows.

Splitwise is supported as both a trigger and an action: New expenses can cause things to happen on other platforms (see Add Trello tasks for new Splitwise expenses), and new expenses can be created automatically after things happen on other platforms (see Create Splitwise expenses for new Google Sheets rows).    

Below is an in-depth how-to for my favorite Zap: How to turn email receipts into Splitwise expenses automatically. 

Many thanks to our friends over at Zapier, who built this integration using the Splitwise API.

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My shared household runs on Amazon Prime and Splitwise: I buy everything from cleaning supplies to curtains from the e-commerce giant, and then manually add the amounts to Splitwise. Amazon email receipts are an important part of this flow: They arrive seconds after I’ve checked out, and I leave them unread until I’ve added a matching Splitwise expense.  

With Zapier I can automate this workflow so that every time I receive an email receipt from Amazon, a matching expense is created in Splitwise with the group / friend of my choosing. Of course you can do this for any email-sending merchant you love, from Seamless to Target.

You’ll need:

1. A Splitwise account (free)
2. A Parser account with 1 Mailbox (free)
3. A Zapier account (free)
4. Any regular email account that offers email forwarding (Gmail does this and is free)

Let’s go! Check out my how-to video or read the below instructions. 

IN PARSER

1. Forward an old Amazon email receipt to your new Parser Mailbox. Create a template based on that forwarded email: Highlight “Amazon.com” and name that field “Description”, and highlight the number beneath “Shipment total”, naming that “Cost”.

IN ZAPIER

2. Start setting up the Parser+Splitwise Zap in Zapier (official Zap name is “Create Splitwise expenses from new parsed emails”).
3. On the “Set Up Splitwise Expense” page in Zapier, you’ll need to specify which field from your email template should be interpreted as the expense description, and which should be interpreted as the expense cost. Select “Parse output cost” for expense cost and “Parse output description” for description.
4. Select the Splitwise group / friend you want to share all future Amazon expenses with.
5. After clicking “Continue” go take a look at your Splitwise account – you should see a new expense that matches the email you forwarded in step 1. It should be paid by you and split equally amongst all participants.
6. If everything looks good in Splitwise, return to Zapier and turn the Zap on.

IN YOUR REGULAR INBOX

7. Visit your main inbox and set up rule-based email forwarding so that all emails from ship-confirm@amazon.com get forwarded to your Parser Mailbox. This will ensure all future Amazon emails get turned into expenses automatically.

Repeat for every merchant you use frequently.