IOU („I owe you“) is a small, yet very helpful tool when it comes to managing group expenses. When travelling with friends or living in a shared apartment, you just create a „pot“ that all participants join. Now, each time you spend money, you create an entry that states the amount paid, who paid, who consumed and how the costs should be distributed (equal, by percentage, by amount). Once pay day arrives, you hit the „Resolve“ button and IOU will display which participants need to give or receive money to balance the sheet.

The best thing is, that you can even use different currencies and IOU will automatically get the corresponding exchange rate for the day you selected when entering the expense. Thus, your resolve screen will only display the currency that you chose when creating the pot.

There’s one problem though: IOU supports only a limited set of currencies. Unfortunately, United Arab Emirates Dirham (AED) and Omani Rial (OMR) are not among them. This makes the tool currently not very useful for me. Since both currencies are pegged with the US Dollar, I just wrote an email to the team and hope that they soon will be supported.