AfterTheDotNet

Billster is a totally free online application which helps you organise and trackyour personal and shared expenses. The interface of the application is designed to have multiple tabs which are home, connections, bills and tags.

The Connections tab  heps you to track of who you’ve had transactions with. Helpfully (pun intended), Billster will send invite emails to your friends if you include their address when you add them.

Under the Bills tab, you can add personal expenses, group expenses, what’s owed you, and what you owe. You can also tag your bills. Unfortunately you cannot import data from your bank directly. To reduce the burden of adding expenses manually you can setup recurring expenses so that you do not need to enter them every time. The interface is similar to the one you use when doing e-banking (making single/recurring payments, etc.).

Shared Bills: If you share a house with other students or professionals, or perhaps you’re organising a holiday with a few people, Billster can take the stress out of sorting out who owes what and when - you can even record standing orders and direct debits so it is possible to let the system keep itself up-to-date with bills that are paid at the same time every day, week, month or year.

Personal Bills: By making use of the bill tagging system, you can create categories and group your bills quickly and easily, helping you keep track of where your money is going. When used along side the date selector, it is possible to work out how much money you spend on everyday items, day by day, or perhaps on a year by year basis. You can do the following with Billster
Record and report on your personal and group expenses

• Save reoccurring expenses, even those with direct debits or standing orders setup
• Send reminders, either automatically or fired off by you, whenever you want to remind people who owe you money or to remind yourself about a payment
• Automatically email you with a summary of the expenses you’ve put through Billster

The most helpful screen is the Dashboard where you can visualize the flow of cash in and out of your account. If you use tags carefully, you can also get a sense of the relative proportions of your spending. Do you spend a lot on haircuts? How much of your income goes to rent? There’s also a half-baked six degrees-ish graphic that shows how many connections you have, how many your friends have, and so on. Maybe more social features will be added soon, and this feature will have added significance.

Finance oriented sites space is showing signs of maturing with new applications being introduced on the web on a regular basis. One would see a lot of applications appearing in this vertical in the next one to two years.