Beezang – Sharing Group Expense Made Easy
Personal finance/expense management solutions are raining these days (a sign that says recession is over?) – we have covered quite a few of them and the latest to catch our attention is Beezang.
Beezang is a group expense management solution that helps you manage and keep track of expenses you share with friends, colleagues and roommates.
The product, ideal for students/working bachelors also lets one track debts/loans with friends and share bills.
Integrated with Google/Yahoo login, Beezang lets you add your friends under different groups based on your association (for instance ‘apartment friends’ vs. ‘office colleagues’).
![Add-Group-Bill[1]](http://www.pluggd.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/AddGroupBill1.png "Add-Group-Bill[1]")
The simplistic product lets you add category, assign a bill to category and view expense reports.
While the product is interesting, the challenge for the team lies in differentiating this with other products who offer much more than this (though smart marketing can make it darling of college campuses).
Beezang – Demo from Beezang on Vimeo.
Moreover, a facebook/orkut app is the need of the day.
What’s your opinion?
Question to the team – Is this a Feature or a Product? If not now, they will need to answer this question in future.
About the author - Ashish Sinha is a Startup Mentor/Product Strategy Coach, and the founder/chief editor of pluGGd.in.
He has launched/managed couple of products (consumer as well as enterprise) in US and India, and now consults with startups/small businesses on their product/media strategy. He can be reached at: ashish (at) pluGGd.in [+91 98452 06443]
[...] Beezang – Sharing Group Expense Made Easy [...]
its a clone of billmonk.com… moreover how do these guys plan to make money? this kindof product is a vitamin but not a painkiller!
Hi Anshul,
We checked out billmonk before starting to work on Beezang. What we observed that the product seems to have been neglected ever since its acqusition. For example, their ssl certificate has expired from last two months and nothing has been done about it yet. And there are lot of people complaining about its service quality on their blog and twitter. Our belief is if there are people out there complaining so vocally about a product, its probably because it actually addressed a pain point and there is an opportunity out there.
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Thanks Ashish for writing about Beezang. Beezang is a product that aims to address the problem of managing group expenses. There are three key components of this problem
1. Making entries of expenses: People are lazy and tend to procrastinate on entering bill details. Right now we just have a web interface. But we have worked hard to keep it as simple as possible so that our users won’t need to spend too much time on figuring out how to use the app. We have couple of other features in pipeline that will allow users to make entries via other mediums.
2. Keeping everyone in the group on the same page: On entering a bill, each participant is notified where she stands on the group and with respect to other members. If your room mates or friend knows that this is the amount she owes you, she will herself take the initiative to settle up when the amount becomes significant.
3. Settling up: We plan to integrate with a payment gateway in future to make this step simpler.
We are still in Alpha but our goal is to evolve into a complete solution covering all the three components mentioned above.