My girlfriend and I have separate bank accounts. In our daily lives, we split costs by rule of thumb. Fixed costs are easy, and for everything else, we take turns. That works for us.

It’s a different story on vacation, where you spend significantly more and can quickly lose track. Accommodation costs are a big chunk right away, but groceries and transportation also add up over the days. How are you supposed to keep track of it all?

During our first vacations together, smartphones were still relatively new on the market and roaming was expensive, so we hardly used them. Back then, you’d send text messages from your vacation because it was the cheapest option. Okay, on the other hand, you were also cut off from everyday life back home. But back to splitting costs.

With the EU roaming law, at the latest, smartphones became practical to use abroad. This paved the way for moving our expense tracking to our smartphones and away from a travel journal. But what’s the easiest way to record expenses, on both devices, and without a new account?

Somehow, I then stumbled upon Splid. It’s a very simple app where you first create a vacation as a group. Other participants can then be invited with a code. The tracking itself is very customizable. A description, amount, and who paid is enough, and the amount is added to the list and settled among all group members. Add an entry with a different date? Categorization? Custom cost splitting? Also not a problem.

At the end of the vacation, you open the summary page and see who owes whom how much money, but you have to settle up the usual way. There is a Pro version that offers more features, like a longer trip history, data export, and categorization. The cost (in the Play Store) is a one-time fee of €2.99. Less than a beer.