Having separate bills can be a pain when you go to restaurants with friends, and some locations won't let you split the tab. You could run into other instances where you may owe someone money or someone needs to pay you. Should you use Venmo to cover your payment needs between friends, or can you find a better mobile app to transfer money?

What Is It?

Venmo is a mobile app created by PayPal. The app starts off by having you create an account to send and receive money from other people that use it. From here, you can connect your phone contacts and Facebook friends to your account, so you can add them all to your Venmo contacts.

Once you create a Venmo account, you can connect your bank account and transfer money. You also have the option to use a credit card or debit card if you don't want to use your bank account. Since Venom is made by PayPal, you can use the app to do your online shopping with most merchants that accept PayPal. This gives you more spending versatility.

As for transferring, Venmo allows you to receive and send money to other users. You accomplish this by either typing in their usernames, phone numbers or email addresses to quickly find people. From here, you can either pay your friends money, or request payments from your friends that may owe you some money.

In short, Venmo allows you to send and request money based on what you may owe each other.

Features

Venmo has multiple features that make it more convenient to transfer money and request payments from your friends. For example, when you go to the Pay or Request section, it will list all of your friends in alphabetical order while also prioritizing your top contacts. This means you can easily contact people about your payments or what they owe.

You also have three tabs at the top of the screen when you go to the main menu: world, friends and yourself. This allows you to see recent payments made in those specific groups. It will show instances of people around the world using Venmo, some exchanges made by your friends and your own payments, respectively.

Remember that the visibility of these transactions depend on your personal privacy settings. For example, your transactions will appear in your personal tab, but you have the option to set it to private if you don't want others to see it. Doing so will allow you to easily maintain your privacy when you use Venmo.

Venmo offers multiple features that make it attractive, but how will that benefit you?

Benefits

Venmo makes life considerably easier if you want to make small and quick payments to your friends. Sure, you could use PayPal, but doing so takes more time and effort while Venmo lets you pay them back quickly. Since you can download the app for free, you will always have access to it, so you can easily pay your friends as needed.

This also means you and your friends don't need to worry as much about payments whenever you go to different places. Instead, someone can put everything on one tab, and everyone else can pay him or her back through Venmo. If anyone forgets to make a payment, the person who covered the tab can send a request to others.

As an added benefit, you can easily see your balance on Venmo, look at your transaction history and even add notes when you send people money. Doing so will remember your friends why you sent them money, so they won't be confused when they receive it. This helps you to better communicate with each other as you transfer money and request payments.

In short, Venmo focuses on convenience, privacy and accessibility.

Pros and Cons

Venmo has some notable pros that make it a great option for people. For example, the balance feature will allow you to control how much money you spend on it. You also have plenty of privacy settings to adjust who can see your payments. If your one of your friends decides to use Venmo on the fly, you can scan his or her QR code to quickly find each other on the app.

However, you should keep some of the cons in mind. If you want to use a credit card when you transfer money on Venmo, you will need to pay a fee every time. You also can't use all of Venmo's features unless you share your personal information with the app, which will make some people uncomfortable and hesitant.

While Venmo does have some cons, it has plenty of advantages that make it a great option. For example, Venmo will send you exclusive offers. It also lets you look through your purchase and transaction history, and you can even setup notifications to let you know when someone requests or sends you money.

If the drawbacks don't bother you, then this app created by PayPal can easily meet your various money transfer needs.

Conclusion

Venmo offers plenty of options to send money and request payments from your friends. Due to its speed, convenience and security, it stands out as an excellent way to transfer money when you need to pay someone back. If you need a simple way to payback your friends, you should install Venmo and give it a try.