On the fringe of my college campus exists a slew of restaurants. Chinese. Greek. Mexican. No matter where you go, you’re gonna have to sit down and eventually tip your hot, um, friendly waitress. But if there’s one thing I can’t do in my head, it’s percentages (especially if more than one person is involved). How the heck do you tip? Does each person leave a dollar? What if one person forgets to bring cash? (Damn card carrying bastard!) For situations such as these, there is Checkmate.

Checkmate is the all in one bill, tip, and discount calculator. Whether you’re splitting the bill between two people or five, tipping extra, or compensating for that guy,  Checkmate has become one of my absolute must have tools on my iPod touch. The convenience and intuitive UI make this a no brainer - if you constantly eat out for example, it’s a must have.

The thing I really love about Checkmate is that actually looks like the bill that you’d be handed before you leave a restaurant. Well at least it looks like the one at local my deli anyway (other places it’s just your casual cashier printout). So already I’m familiar with the layout - it’s something I’ve seen before.

With the interface being used to its fullest extent, there is no wasted space on the screen. This doesn’t mean that there’s clutter - quite the contrary - it’s all used very well. With the keypad, you enter the amount for your bill. More than likely, the bill you receive will already have discounts applied (we’ll talk about how that works later). You can also used the scroll wheel to adjust how much you tip (hopefully you tip either %15 or %20), and how many people are splitting the bill.

First, you’ll want to enter the bill into Checkmate. You’re entering the final amount (after taxes and discounts are applied). Keep in mind that Checkmate is a tipping application - it’s designed to ensure you and your friends give your friendly waiter an accurate and healthy tip. After all, it’s only proper.

With the amount entered, you’ll get a run down of how much the total bill costs (that you’ve entered), how much you’ll have to tip, the total after everything is added up, and the split. If you’re eating with friends, couples, whoever, the split is infinitely helpful.

By tapping the split amount, you can do lots of really cool things. Firstly, you can adjust a person’s split. If they aren’t paying or want to pay more, you can adjust a value for one person, and Checkmate will calculate the rest. You can also drag and drop splits on top of each other to combine people (for couples and families). Once the splits are tallied up correctly, I just pass my iPod touch around the table so everyone knows how much they owe. To make things easy on everyone, before adjusting the split, you can round up the Tip or Split amount to the nearest dollar.

So about that the discount: the idea is that when you get the bill, you enter the final amount into Checkmate with discounts applied. This is something I didn’t understand at first and had to email Hand Carved Code about. After a quick response, it made sense. You don’t want to tip based on the discounted amount, but rather the original amount. So when enter discounts into Checkmate, you’re actually adding the amount discounted to your tip base. This is fair.

After everything is settled, you can actually save or email your receipts (which I think is really grand). You can name the receipts and access them later through the receipt history if you wish.

Checkmate is a wonderful app that’s not only powerful, but makes paying the bill just downright simple. I think you guys will really love it, so I’m giving away five copies to those responsible enough to tip every time. Check out the rules below for more information. In the meantime, Checkmate is only $0.99 in the App Store. Thanks to Hand Carved Code for the review & giveaway licenses.

Giveaway

Alright folks, just leave a comment below if you’re in need of a great tip calculator, and tell us a little about how you usually tip your favorite waitress or waiter. For example, until Checkmate, I used a cardboard reference card. The content ends Saturday, April 17th.