Splitwise is great. It is also not a loan tracker — by its own admission

A reasonable first instinct: you already use Splitwise for dinners and trips, so why not put the $3,000 you lent your brother in there too?

You can. It just does not work well, and the clearest evidence comes from Splitwise itself.

What Splitwise says

Splitwise describes itself as an app for splitting expenses with friends and family. That is the homepage tagline and the Help Centre definition.

On its public feedback forum, a request titled "Lending" is marked Declined. The official reply from Splitwise Support in July 2016: "We've considered lending, but don't plan to add it to the app. You can record lending money by adding an expense where the person you are lending money to owes you the full amount."

A separate request — "Ability to auto charge interest on a periodical basis" — has been open since 2012 with 227 votes, status "Under review." Splitwise Support's answer in September 2016 was that they had no plans to add interest features, because it "would add too much complexity and require us to redesign some significant parts of our user experience."

The Help Centre has six categories and no articles about loans, IOUs, or interest.

None of this is a criticism. It is a company being clear about its scope, which is more than most do.

Why the workaround falls apart

The suggested approach — record the loan as an expense allocated 100% to the borrower — breaks in four places.

No interest. A loan with a rate cannot be represented at all. This is the request that has been open for over a decade.

No principal-versus-interest distinction. So a partial repayment cannot be applied correctly, because there is nothing for it to be applied to.

No time. An expense is an event on a date. A loan is a balance that changes every day. Splitwise has no concept of something accruing.

It contaminates the balance. Users have complained about exactly this: a $3,000 loan and last Friday's $40 dinner land in the same net figure. Now you cannot see either clearly, and settling up becomes ambiguous.

Payment apps are not it either

Venmo and Zelle are rails, not records. Zelle's own FAQ stresses it is for people you trust and offers no purchase protection.

More to the point: in a transaction history, a loan repayment and an unrelated reimbursement look identical. There is no balance, no due date, no principal. You can move the money; you cannot know where you stand.

That may be part of why Zelle's own 2026 research found 76% of Gen Z who fronted money for a group expense were not fully repaid. When the record is a payment feed, the record is not really a record.

What a loan actually needs

Four things an expense splitter structurally does not have: a principal that changes over time, an interest rate that accrues daily, a rule for how repayments are applied, and a shared view so both people see one balance instead of two memories.

Use Splitwise for the trip. Use something built for loans for the loan. The tools are not competing — they are answering different questions.