If you’ve ever lived in a house with multiple roommates, then you know the pain of collecting for the various bills each month and keeping track of who paid what and when. Add to that the frustration of one person paying cash while another only has checks on hand, and you’ll be ready to call it quits.
That is, unless you’ve found WePay, the online payment service launching tomorrow custom made to handle situations like roommates, teams, organizations or any group where everyone pitches in.
The company has been in private beta for the past six months and says that its testers have been giving it rave reviews. If it does what it says it does, we wouldn’t see why not.
So far, it has received funding from August Capital, Max Levchin (the founder of PayPal), Ron Conway (early investor in Google, Facebook and Twitter), Eric Dunn (former CTO and CFO of Intuit), and others.
WePay allows its users to set up shared financial accounts with varying levels of access for different users, giving them a way to manage group payments and finances. Asking your roommates to pay the monthly Internet bill doesn’t have to be a scrap of paper on the kitchen counter or a pocketful of unrolled coins, it can be an automated email and electronic payment.
The group accounts are FDIC-insured and can make payments by a WePay VISA prepaid card, paper checks and electronic transfers. Of course, the way WePay makes money in all of this is by taking a little bit of each transaction. According to the company, it collects “as little as 50 cents per transaction”.
On the other end of it, for the people paying into a group pot, WePay also offers some transparency, as they can watch where their collected funds are being spent. After having spent some years in cooperative living environments, this services sounds like a dream come true.
