Settle Up is a solid group expense tracker: log the shared costs and it simplifies the debts down to the fewest payments, so nobody's paying three different people. But it only tracks; it doesn't collect. If you need the money gathered upfront instead of tallied after, the alternative is a group fund. TableCash collects the money: everyone chips in by card, it lands with one trusted organizer through Stripe, the organizer approves what leaves, and the whole group sees every dollar.

Settle Up simplifies the debt, then hands it back

Settle Up does its job well. You log a group's shared expenses and it does the clever part, simplifying a tangle of who-owes-whom down to the fewest possible payments, so instead of five people each paying two others, everyone squares up in a couple of transfers. For a group that just wants the cleanest way to settle after the fact, that's genuinely helpful. But the simplifying stops at the instruction. The app never collects, holds, or moves the money, it tells everyone the shortest path to pay, then trusts them to go do it elsewhere. And for money that has to be there before the thing happens, the instruction is the easy half.

What each one actually does

1. Settle Up tracks and simplifies. It logs shared costs and boils the debts down to the fewest payments. No money is collected or held by the app.
2. TableCash collects the money. Everyone chips in their share by card and it lands with one trusted organizer through Stripe, before anything gets booked or bought.
3. Settle Up still leaves the paying to you. It hands the group a short list of transfers and trusts everyone to make them later.
4. TableCash puts one person in charge. The organizer holds the money and approves what leaves, and the whole group sees the balance, who chipped in, and what went out.

When simplified debts still don't get paid

Settle Up shines when the spending already happened and you just want the shortest way to even out, a shared house's running costs, a trip where everyone covered bits. The gap is the same one every tracker has: the fewest payments are still payments someone has to remember to make, and a couple of people won't. When the money has a deadline, a deposit, dues, a group gift, you don't want a tidy list of who should pay whom, you want the money actually collected in one place, held by one person, with everyone watching it land. That's what TableCash adds that a tracker can't. TableCash never holds the money; it moves through Stripe to the organizer, and the app is the record everyone can open. If you want the fuller version, here's a Splitwise alternative that collects.