Someone owes you forty dollars. You know this because it has been rattling around your head for eleven days, filed somewhere between a vague grievance and that thing you meant to say in the meeting. It isn't in your budget. It isn't in your balance. The only record of it is your mood. Most people looking for an app to track money owed to me arrive at that point for the same reason: not one big loan, but four small ones they've quietly lost count of.
The fix is boring and it works. You write the debt down the moment it happens, in a place you'll actually look again, and you stop asking your memory to do a job it's bad at.
Why money owed to you disappears from your budget
When you cover someone's share, two things happen to your numbers and only one of them gets recorded. Your account goes down by the full amount, which you see. A chunk of that becomes a debt someone owes you, which you don't see anywhere. So for as long as it stays unpaid, your spending looks worse than it actually was, and you have no idea by how much.
That gap does real damage over a busy month. You pick up a dinner bill, buy the group's festival tickets, cover a friend's taxi. On paper you've had a shocking month for eating out. In reality a decent slice of that is sitting in other people's accounts, and because you can't see the total you can't tell whether you overspent or simply pre-paid for other people.
An unrecorded debt isn't neutral. It quietly shows up as overspending in your own numbers, which is a strange way to be punished for being the one who paid.
The other cost is social, and it's the one people actually mind. Debts you haven't written down get fuzzy, and fuzzy debts are the ones you feel weird about raising, because you're no longer certain whether it was thirty or forty and whether they already got you back with the coffees.
The best app to track money owed to me, and when a note is enough
Three options, and the honest answer is that any of them beats your memory. Pick by how often it happens to you.
- A note on your phone. Fine for one or two debts at a time. One line each, name and amount and date. It takes ten seconds to set up and it will never give you a total you can trust, because you'll forget to delete settled rows.
- A spreadsheet. Good if the amounts are large or there are several people involved, like a shared holiday. You get arithmetic and a running balance. You also have to open a spreadsheet at the restaurant table, which nobody does, so entries arrive late or not at all.
- An expense app that handles splits. The point here isn't features, it's that you're already in the app logging the payment. If marking your friend's half as owed is part of entering the expense, the record gets created at the only moment you'll reliably do it.
If you're regularly the person who pays and sorts it out later, the third option is the only one that survives contact with real life. The other two depend on you doing a second, separate admin task after the fact, and that task is exactly the one that gets skipped.
This is the gap Bud is built for. Logging an expense takes about seven seconds, and you split it as you enter it, so someone's share is recorded with the expense instead of living in your head. Buddy, the assistant built in, sorts the category so you aren't picking from a list, and on an iPhone the Action Button opens a new expense before you've put your card away. There are no bank logins at any point. If you've already got balances living in Splitwise, you can import them rather than starting from zero. Bud is free to download, and Bud Plus is $1.99 a month or $15.99 a year.
What to write down so the debt is actually recoverable
A name and a number isn't enough, because the thing that makes asking awkward is uncertainty about the details. Four fields are plenty:
- The amount, and whose share it was. “Dan, $38” is worse than “Dan, $38, his half of the Thai place”. The second one answers the question he'll ask.
- The date. Mostly so you know whether it's four days old or four months old, which changes how you raise it.
- What you agreed, if anything. “Said he'd send it Friday” is a different debt from one where nothing was said at all.
- Partial payments. This is where most informal tracking falls apart. Someone sends twenty of the thirty-eight, you don't update anything, and two weeks later neither of you can remember the remainder.
Round the numbers if it speeds you up. Logging $38 instead of $37.60 is not the thing that will cost you a friendship, whereas never logging it at all might.
How to ask for it back without it being weird
Most people wait too long and then ask apologetically, which makes it feel bigger than it is. Two days later, a specific message about a specific amount is barely a conversation. Three weeks later, the same message sounds like an accusation, because the delay implies you've been stewing.
So raise it early and make it easy to settle. Name the amount, name what it was for, and attach it to something that was already happening. “Sending you the Thai place total, $38 for your half” does all three and asks nothing emotional of either of you.
If someone has gone quiet on a larger amount, one plain follow-up is reasonable and a second is usually wasted. At that point you're choosing between the money and the friction, and it's worth deciding on purpose rather than letting it rot for another month.
Split it up front and you won't have to chase anything
Tracking debts is a cure. The prevention is not creating them, which you do by splitting at the table rather than agreeing to sort it out later. Sort it out later is the phrase that generates almost every small debt that never gets paid.
Agree the split before the card goes down, especially for anything repeating like rent or household bills. There's more on the mechanics in the posts on splitting bills with friends and, when incomes are uneven, on splitting bills fairly by income.
Write off what isn't coming back
Some of it won't be repaid, and keeping it on the list forever is worse than losing it. Two months on a small amount is a fair limit. After that, either ask once more properly or mark it as a gift, delete the row and let it go.
Reclassify it as spending rather than pretending it's an asset. Your numbers get honest again, you stop carrying a tiny resentment around, and the list stays short enough that you'll still trust it next month. A tracker full of debts you've privately given up on is just a list of people you're mildly annoyed at.
Track your money in seconds, not spreadsheets.
Bud is free to download, built for iPhone, and never asks for a bank login.
