I don’t know how your friends will take it when you pull out your iPhone or iPod Touch and fire up the new finance app Deadbeat. While you could possibly lose some social invites, Deadbeat aims to ensure that you won’t spend more than your fair share of money when you do go out, by tracking whose turn it is to foot the bill.
With Deadbeat, you enter in the names of friends who you commonly share expenses with, either pulling them from your address book or entering a new name manually. When people on your list lay out a credit card, you enter in the amount they pay. Deadbeat keeps a running total of how much each participant spends and on how many occasions. When the bill is presented, you can tap each of your friends present, and the app will indicate whose turn it is to pay with a glowing ring around the dollar sign.
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Users can shake the app to select a random participant to pay the tab, but I found this to be a bit buggy. I was given a random answer every time I tried it, but after using the feature, the app would no longer give an accurate result of who should pay based on previous payments. A relaunch of the app fixed the issue, but that’s a big problem with an app this content-light.
Deadbeat is a simple app, but it’s really made for social butterflies who don’t like splitting checks period — the app works best if you have only one person pay the check on each outing. That’s not always practical, so it’d be nice to see the app roll out some additional calculations to help with check-splitting.
