Penny Pool 0.5.4 review

Penny Pool is a small utility to ease the pooling of expenses. It facilitates the administration of many (small) shared expenses, wh

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 31K Developer: Frank van Lankvelt

0

Penny Pool is a small utility to ease the pooling of expenses.

It facilitates the administration of many (small) shared expenses, which typically add up to significant amounts. It uses PHP/MySQL/Apache, and has an emphasis on easy installation.

A well-known problem in groups of people is how to distribute costs of collective payments. What usually happens is that one person pays and expects the rest of the group to then pay their respective shares to him / her. This is not a problem for a single incident, but when multiple events occur, with different persons paying, it would clearly be better to pool these events.

Payments can then be set up within the group, such that the number of money transfers is minimized.

PennyPool helps in administering these kinds of expenses in the form of a simple web application. First of all, the mere fact that expenses can be entered in a central location (to which everyone has access) makes it clear to everyone who should pay what. Furthermore, it is possible to group these expenses in settlements, which can be used as a starting point for actual payments among the members of the group.

These payments can also be entered and attached to the settlement. In this way, the progress of the settlement can be seen and it is obvious how much should still be paid.
The database only stores information that was entered directly. All presented data (e.g. balance) is calculated in real-time.

Precision is therefore limited by MySQL and/or PHP, only two decimal places are shown for readability. (this also means that the cents/pennies don't always add up, in which case a "miereneuker" should use the rounded cumulative result. As opposed to harassing me...)

What's New in This Release:
It is now possible to bill participants multiple times. This makes it easy to use PennyPool even when some participants to an event are not registered users.