Just a quick update that we have finally enabled true UTF-8 encoding support on the site. No more stupid ‘?’ and diamond characters anywhere. With so many international users, we really should have got this going sooner. Oh well, better late than never!

Feel free to drop us a line if you encounter any problems.

Oh, and stay tuned for a major feature release tomorrow :)

We have introduced RSS feeds for your transactions. So, those of you think email is too passé as a notification mechanism should be happy now! We will soon add more customization to the feeds — so that you can tailor it to get notified about exactly the information you are interested in.

You can find the feed settings on the Transaction History page.

One of the most loved features of our site are the expense analysis views. But, it did not quite provide our users the complete power to arbitrarily slice and dice their transactions. This showed through the sporadic emails that they wrote to us. And so, we went back to the design board and completely re-worked the expense analysis UI. Here’s what we’ve got:

Changes we made:

• We now utilize the full page height for showing the transactions, so you can see more than just a few transactions in each “view”. Some of you don’t like pagination much :) and we hear ya!
• For selecting periods, instead of the slider, you can now select an arbitrary start date and an (almost) arbitrary period to get the precise view you are looking for. Navigation arrows also take into account the period preference; this makes month-to-month navigation dead simple.
• In doing so, we did need to get rid of the beloved “slider”, which was quite an impressive piece of Javascript by itself! :( But, in our minds, usability comes first, beauty and technology, next!

We hope the new interface provides more power and better usability. Let us know how you like it. We are always all ears for anything and everything you have to say!

Groups within Buxfer are not just a simple collection of friends - they also provide a powerful facility of debt cancellation. For example, they eliminate debt cycles between the members of the group.

However, it turned out that this feature was just a little too advanced for some of our new users. Therefore, we have introduced a way for new users to get started with a simple, non-consolidated group and then convert the group into a consolidated group, if they wish to do so. A non-consolidated group just acts as a way for filtering transactions.

When a group moderator decides to consolidate balances within the group, the following two things happen:

1. You only have a balance with respect to the group as a whole.
2. You no longer have balances with individual group members.

An example might make this clearer. Imagine that within a group Housemates, you had the following balances

• John owes $10 to Sara since she paid for groceries.
• Sara owes $10 to Adam since he paid for the movie.
• Adam owes $10 to John since John paid for beer.

If this group were not consolidated, John would see that he owes $10 to Sara, and gets $10 from John. Similarly, for the other group members. However, notice that if you considered the group as a whole, nobody owes anybody any money at ALL! All their debts cancel off! This is what would happen if this group was converted into a consolidated group.

Hope our new users will find this concept (which is slightly complex, but much useful) a little bit easier to come to grips with.