Sharing a credit card account with authorized users can be convenient. Keeping track of what everyone owes the primary account holder is another thing entirely!
Done manually, it means reviewing transactions, figuring out who made each purchase, tracking payments and credits, avoiding missed or duplicate charges, and somehow staying confident that the resulting balance is right.
Chase Authorized User Reimburser is a small application built to take the hassle out of that process. It currently works with Chase credit card accounts, although the underlying idea could easily be expanded to support other card providers if there were a reason to do so.
A typical weekly process walks the user (usually the primary account holder) through importing recent Chase activity and the supporting cardholder information needed to identify who made each purchase. The application automatically matches most transactions to the appropriate authorized user and leaves the exceptions for manual review. Payments are recorded in the same system, creating a persistent ledger rather than another collection of numbers to keep track of manually.
There’s a reason for the extra matching step. Chase identifies the authorized user alongside transactions in its online activity view, but that information isn’t included with the downloaded transaction data. The application brings those two sources together and determines which transactions belong to which authorized user. Most are matched automatically; ambiguous cases are left for review rather than silently assigned.
The useful part isn’t simply calculating what someone owes. It’s being able to see why that’s the amount owed.
For each authorized user, the application can produce a focused portion of the ledger showing the relevant transactions and payments without overwhelming them with the entire history. That gives both sides something concrete to review when a balance doesn’t look right.
After using it for months, going back to doing this manually would be hard to imagine.
Still on the bench.
Two parts still feel much more like a development workflow than a finished application.
Getting the data into the application still requires the primary account holder to sign into Chase and collect both sources needed by the matching process. That’s the biggest remaining manual step in what has otherwise become a much simpler weekly process.
Opening the application itself is still a development process too: start the local environment, launch the development server, open the application in a browser, and shut everything back down afterward.
Both are obvious places to keep working: make getting the data easier, and make opening the application much simpler. That could eventually mean hosting it as a SaaS application, packaging it as a standalone desktop application, or taking another path that makes it practical to distribute and use without a development environment. That decision hasn’t been made yet.