Venmo, owned by PayPal, is launching a new feature today enabling users to track and manage various expenses within groups, such as family or roommate household expenses, club or sports team expenses, and community organization costs. It allows users to seamlessly track, split, manage, and settle ongoing expenses directly within the Venmo app.
This feature aims to replace manual bookkeeping methods, such as spreadsheets or dedicated apps for clubs, activities, trips, or household bills. Instead, it can automatically calculate each individual’s share of the overall expenses, simplifying the process for users to settle their expenses within Venmo’s familiar interface.
The new feature seeks to attract users from single-purpose apps like Splitwise, designed for organizing group expenses. These range from apps focused on local clubs to those facilitating the splitting of travel expenses on group trips or bills among roommates. It expands on Venmo’s existing use case, where friends split bills during outings by Venmo’ing each other the owed amount for a round or meal. This informal usage has extended to other forms of group expenses, and the new feature formalizes this functionality.
Venmo Groups: Simplifying Shared Expenses for Seamless Group Management
Erika Sanchez, Vice President and General Manager of Venmo stated, “We understand that managing ongoing expenses in a group can be challenging, especially when members cover different costs with varying amounts at different times.” She added, “Venmo Groups, one of our most requested features, provides a seamless solution for users to effectively track and settle shared expenses in group settings.
Beyond the advantage of splitting expenses within a familiar app, the feature empowers everyone in the group to manage expenses, eliminating the need for one person to track everything. Once a Venmo Group is created, any member can contribute expenses, view amounts owed, and settle up.
The company anticipates that little league groups, neighborhood supper clubs, kickball teams, book clubs, and other small groups, which exist between the default “friends and family” mode and the client-vendor relationship often facilitated by Venmo today, will readily adopt this feature.
Users can access Groups by navigating to the “Me” page in the app. Within the new “Groups” tab, they can create a group, add expenses, and settle up.
The feature will start rolling out to select users today via the Venmo app for both iOS and Android, reaching the broader user base in the next couple of weeks.
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