allow for "secret" expenses in a group.
Dear Splitwise team,
first of all thanks for a great application! It would be even more awesome if it supported the following use case:
I frequently run into situations where in a group of people, we want to share the cost of a present for one of the group members among the rest. It would be awesome to use the existing Splitwise group, but of course we don't want the person who got the present to know how much we paid.
Or is there a convenient way to take care of this that I have not discovered yet? As far as I know, if I add it as an expense outside of the group, there is no way to include it in the payment simplification, right?
We’ve decided not to do this. If an expense is in a group, every member should be able to see it. Once you can’t see all of the expenses, it’s impossible to verify that the totals are correct and we’re not willing to break this.
Marshall
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sanchezjr89 commented
Would be nice to have balance owed and balances overdue/remaining to be private to the specific user. My roommate struggles with paying bills on time and feels embarrassed since the other roommates can see he hasn’t paid in full and has a balance remaining.
This should be private to the landlord (me) and the person who owes. -
Anonymous commented
My use case is the following: I am buying presents for Xmas with my sisters for our parents, children and ourselves. It is great to have all the expenses in a group so that we can have the balances simplified (debt simplification is our favorite Splitwise feature). Currently, we can create expenses in which somebody from the group is not involved (I am obviously not involved in the expense related to the present from my sisters to me!), but I can still click on the expense and see who paid and the amount of the expense. Hiding the expenses in which I am not involved would not interfere with the amount of money I owe or lent. My balance will still be the same.
As far as the implementation is concerned, it seems to be a relatively easy task to implement as every task in which I am involved should be shown while every task in which I am not involved should not be shown. Therefore showing = NOT("not involved").
Finally using "non-group" expenses is not a solution as the debt simplification feature does not apply to "non-group" expenses. And debt simplification is available only on the web, not on the mobile app.