Keep tabs on loans to mates with BillMonk

Link: » Billmonk, track money owed between friends | The Social Web | ZDNet.com

Have you ever lent a friend or relative money, only for them to conveniently ‘forget’ – or even worse dispute – the money? If so, your troubles are over, courtesy of a new service called BillMonk.

Billmonk is a web service that helps users organise their ‘social money”, defined by the site as the informal currency between friends. So for example, you’re out for dinner with a group of friends and the final bill has to be split in some way. Who owes who what? And to complicate things further, different people are likely to ‘settle up’ at different times. Things aren’t always written down and the process can sometimes put a stress on friendships. Billmonk hopes to solve this problem by managing social money ‘in a manner that is easy and fair.”

You can use it from your mobile too, but alas it’s a little backward, relying on you being able to email via SMS. Apparently Cingular, Nextel, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon support this in the US at the moment. What would be better is a shortcode or long number (like Twitter use) instead – then there’d be no faffing around with email via SMS.