After hackUST, I have been asking my friends how they handle small debts with friends. One interesting case will be one of my friends (I would call her “Miss W” here) travelling with her buddies to Macau. I told her my idea of IOU One. She immediately felt very excited about my project because she nearly fainted in this travel expense issue. She would be very happy to pay for my mobile app solution.

 

This was how she worked after the trip:

You can see that she was using an excel template to fill in the expenses. The blurred areas are the trip attendants. I would call Miss W “Ninja of Travel Expenses” now. She said that she used to manipulate this template to calculate travel expenses after a vacation. Her friends would pay back the payment via ATM and whatsapped her the payment receipts. This is a typical heavy usage of IOUs with 1 creditor and n debtors. I am still thinking how it should be handled.

 

My IOU One idea will be paying back your friends via favors. The concept will be virtualizing the debts to virtual entities called favors. But Miss W wanted to know how much each of the trip attendant should pay back. She wanna look for a handy solution to record the payment transactions during the trip.  And each one can share the records afterwards so that the administrative works can be reduced. If the debts can be immediately settled via payment gateway inside a mobile app, it will be saving huge efforts.

 

How do you think? Please leave me a comment here.