Venmo, which is owned by PayPal, is rolling out a new feature starting today that will allow its users to track and manage multiple expenses across groups — such as family expenses or family expenses, clubs or sports teams, community organizations, and more. With Venmo Groups, users will be able to track, separate, manage, and settle these ongoing expenses within the Venmo app.
The feature is intended to replace more manual bookkeeping methods such as spreadsheets or the use of other dedicated applications for individual clubs, activities, travel or household accounts, for example. Instead, the new feature will be able to automatically calculate the person’s expenses owed as part of the total spend, helping users organize their expenses in Venmo’s familiar interface.
Image Credits: Venmo
The addition could potentially cannibalize the user base of disposable apps aimed at organizing group expenses, such as Splitwise, ranging from those aimed at local clubs to those that help people split travel costs on group trips or bills between roommates, among others. It also builds on Venmo’s existing use case, where friends split the bill when out drinking or dining by drinking each other the amount they owe for a ride or meal, which then led to the app being used for other forms of group spending , at least unofficially, until now.
“We know that managing ongoing expenses in a group can be difficult, especially when each member covers different expenses with different amounts at different times,” Erika Sanchez, Venmo’s vice president and general manager, said in a statement about the feature release. “As one of our most requested features, Venmo Groups offers a seamless solution for users to better track and organize shared expenses in group settings,” he added.
In addition to the benefit of splitting expenses into an app that multiple people already have installed and know how to use, the feature also allows everyone on the team to be responsible for managing expenses, rather than requiring one person to keep track of everything. Once a Venmo Group is created, anyone in the group can add expenses, see amounts owed, and get set up.
The company expects the feature to be easily adopted by little league teams, neighborhood supper clubs, kickball teams, book clubs and other small groups, covering the default “friends and family” mode and customer-vendor relationship that is also often used in Venmo for today.
To access Groups, users will find the new feature through the “Me” page in the app. Under the new “Teams” tab they can create a team, add expenses and set up.
The feature will begin rolling out to select users today through the Venmo app for iOS and Android, and will roll out to the broader user base over the next two weeks.
