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For three IITians, currently pursuing their computer science courses at Carnegie Melon University, high rate of accumulating bills and scraps of paper was something that was doing them in. These bills, apart from other things, were primarily of group dinners with friends or for household expenses. This was the trigger for the trio-Ashwin Bharambe and Shashank Pandit, PhD students, and Amit Manjhi, a graduate student, in the Computer Science department at Carnegie Mellon University stumbled upon the idea of an online solution to this accounting problem. Buxfer.com is a free website through which users can track their shared and personal expenses. The company, which was part of the prestigious Y-Combinator program (Winter 2007 batch), has now expanded to allow users to track their personal expenses.

Fixing Calculation Woes
Talking about origin of the concept, Amit Manjhi, who is doing research on scalability service for database-backed Web applications says, "Buxfer started as a small script one of us wrote about three years ago. As graduate students, having food usually meant eating out with a bunch of fellow sufferers somewhere near our university. With such high rate of accumulating bills, our memories and scraps of paper were just not enough. So we wrote a small simple script to keep track of our debts."

Elaborating the problem, Ashwin Bharambe, who is currently working on distributed system and multi player gaming adds, "We started running multiple copies of the script-splitting the dinner bill among our Carnegie Mellon friends, managing the household expenses, managing ski-trip expenses, splitting bills with new housemates during internships. Next, the fellow interns and students in our department realized how convenient it was to use the script and started asking us for copies of the script."

Word about the script's usefulness continued to grow and soon friends of friends and their friends started running their own local instances of the script. However, multiple copies of scripts created a problem-whenever there was an update to the script, it was to be send to everyone. Moreover, adding new members to a copy of the script was difficult. Thus, was born Buxfer.com to address both these problems.

Keeping Track
With Buxfer, users can track who owes them how much money apart from where they are spending it. Users can report expenses on Buxfer either online, through SMS or by sending an email to a user-specific Buxfer email address. Buxfer.com provides several other features including login via third party authentication APIs from Google, OpenID, AOL, Yahoo and Facebook. This protects users from directly giving personal information. Users can also import transactions from their banks and credit cards, via simple browse/upload function. The site also allows selection of any key word in a transaction description and has it auto-tagged. The tags are used in automatic categorization of expenses. Users can also easily add note or attach files, such as receipts, to individual transactions. Also, Google Widget/gadget that shows expense breakdown can be displayed directly on the desktop. According to Shashank Pandit, "What I like most about Buxfer is the way it reveals powerful features to the user through a simple and usable interface. Digging through my expenses at the end of the month is not boring anymore, it has actually become fun."

Competition is hotting up in the space and there are several websites which track expenses. Some of them are www.xpensetracker.com, www.billmonk.com, www.herbudget.com, GetMyExpense.com, www.budget5000.com, and www.iOweyou.com.

Sudesh Prasad
sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in

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