We can finally deliver a long requested (and promised) feature: You can now shuffle debts between your contacts to reduce overall debts!
Shuffling debts
It is very common that within a group of friends, if you have made a handful of payments together that everyone had some kind of transactions with everyone else in the group. Which results in many small “debt connections” between everyone in this group. To make it possible to reduce the number of debts between contacts you can now easily “shuffle” around debt. The overall amount of your debt vs. credit will stay the same, but the number of transactions required to get everyone even usual reduces drastically.
I want to shuffle, now!
Shuffling debts is a bit of a hot topic, because everyone has to understand why his credits/debts change. This is why we currently have two requirements for shuffling debts:
- You can only shuffle within one “Context Group”
- Everyone who is affected by a shuffle transaction has to confirm it, before it takes effect.
Context Group
So first of all you have to create a “Context Group” and invite the contacts you wish to shuffle debts. Context Groups are a way to give context to your transactions and contacts. You can simply “Tag” transactions with a context group so you are able to easily find them. For example if you take a holiday trip together, make sure to invite everyone into one group so all your transactions during that trip can be neatly organised within this group.
So if you don’t have a context group yet, head over to https://tabsplit.com/groups/ and click the ‘Create new Context Group’ – Give it a useful name, like ‘NYC Weekend Trip’ or if there is no current activity just call it ‘Shuffle with friends’. Afterwards you can invite your contacts into this group. Once everyone has accepted your invitation you can finally start shuffling!
Start Shuffling
Once you have more than three of your contacts in the context group you can try if a shuffle reduces your debts. Head over to your context group and click the big green ‘Shuffle Debts’ button. – Don’t worry, this button will only give you a preview of the shuffle, nothing will actually happen yet.
Preview Shuffle
Once you click the “Shuffle Debts” button you will get a short introduction to shuffling procedure and a summary of transactions to shuffle the debts. If you are happy with the outcome of the shuffle just click the ‘Looks good, create shuffle’ button at the bottom of the page. Once this is done, all of your affected contacts will have to review and approve it before it takes effect.
Hope you like shuffling! Try it out, and let us know what you think – just leave a comment below or write in the forum.