Social payment service Buxfer has added peer to peer payments to its money management system. The payment system is supported through Amazon’s new Flexible Payments web service we reported on earlier. Buxfer is one of the first companies on the service’s private beta along with Jungle Disk, Freshbooks, and Beetlabs. Buxfer will be footing the bill for the 1-2% transaction fees till the end of August. They will also be rewarding users that add their friends to the service.
Buxfer, similar to Billmonk (sold to Obopay last year), lets you track and tag your expenses with friends and groups. Social payment sites like these aren’t meant to replace beefier accounting applications like Quicken or Wesabe, but rather easily track account balances with a heavy social networking component. You can either add you payments to Buxfer manually or import a payment statement from your bank, Quicken, or Microsoft Money. Having your payments on Buxfer lets you manage your balances with friends and analyze your expenses over time through pie charts and graphs. Since we last covered them, Buxfer has added a Facebook, mobile, and iPhone application.
The new payment system adds the option to “send a payment”. Sending a payment requires the email of Buxfer account you want to send the payment to and the amount. Submitting the transaction will take you to Amazon Payment’s site, which will handle the rest of the process. If the recipient has an Amazon account, the money will simply be deposited. Unfortunately, If they don’t have an account, Amazon will just pester you to get your friend on the service before the transaction can be completed.