Plates by Splitwise

This app is absolutely amazing at easily dividing portions, dissociation taxes and tip. I love how you can divide by item on your bill, and then further divide items by only some or all of the attendees if shared. It's also great that you can then combine itemized plates for people paying together. I have only two suggestions that would really make this perfect: 1. Allow user to type in tip amount. I regularly calculate 20% and then will round up to the next dollar amount when paying, but this app only has a percentage slider. It also only goes to 25%, and sometimes for exceptional service I exceed way past that. 2. Allow naming of plates. If it's only 2 or 3 people, it's not hard to keep track of who is who, but beyond that can get a little tricky.

Generally like this app—the interface is clean and easy to use. I wish that there was more flexibility. It hasn’t been updated in a while, which makes me sad because there are so many features that would make it better. Features I wish it included: 1) integration with Splitwise. If I split a bill in a trip it’s a pain to copy the bill into Splitwise. I have my own way of splitting within Splitwise but plates makes it easier to add the cost of multiple dishes things together. 2) customized tip amounts. Sometimes the tip is not exactly a percentage, or the person paying used one of the suggested tips which calculates 20% different using the tax vs not. It’s annoying when it’s off that way. It also won’t allow you to go beyond 25% which doesn’t work in certain circumstances. 3) more flexibility in how things are split. There are also times when it’s appropriate to split the tip evenly instead of proportionately. For example, in some European cultures the tip is a fixed amount relatively unrelated to the exact cost of the meal and that would be split evenly. In other times I’ve had friends who want to split a dish in a different way that half. For example if there are 10 of a thing and one person eats 5, and the other two people eat 2 and 3, someone may want to split proportionate to how much they ate. In Splitwise they have the option to split in shares or in percentages and I think those splitting options should be here too.

I’ve been looking for a tool like this and finally decided to do a Google search because something like this surely should exist already, right? This is the only solution I happened upon. I would have given 5 stars, but I discovered one feature that I think should be revised: the tip functionality. The tip portion of this app defaults to a slider that only goes up to 25% and doesn’t accommodate incorporating a tip beyond that amount. We wanted to leave a 30% tip and have the app perform the same split calculation according to the portion each person would be responsible for. We needed to do that math separately with a calculator because this app does not accommodate this. The user experience would be improved if the slider could move to an unlimited number or allow the user the type the dollar amount they want to give as a tip. It would be great if the app could be revised to accommodate both instances so that if the user wants to learn what the tip would be at a certain percentage, the user could find that number. And, alternatively, if the user knows the dollar amount they want to tip, this app should be able to also specify what percentage that is. Regardless, the app should allow someone to calculate a tip far beyond just 25% of the bill. Once that feature is updated, I would give 5 stars without hesitation.