Dining out with friends gets complicated when it's time to split the bill. Everyone crams a combination of cash and plastic into the leather bill folder, and the unlucky waitperson has to deal with a tangle of dollars, cards and instructions.
The creators of restaurant app Cover want to make sure you never have to deal with that kind of scenario again. The app splits the bill for you, and you can pay directly from your smartphone without waiting for the check.
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For 2.5 million potential diners living in Brooklyn, Cover is now available at 13 of the borough's eateries. The app is expanding its reach beyond Manhattan, where it's been streamlining restaurant bills at some 43 establishments since its public launch in October 2013.
"The number-one request from our users was to come to Brooklyn," Cover co-founder Mark Egerman says, regarding the company's new 30% growth spurt. "We always knew that it was something we had to do."
You can find a full list of Cover's participating restaurants, in both Manhattan and Brooklyn, here.
"It's been sort of an operational challenge to get everyone ready, all on board, and get everyone to be turned on the same day," Egerman says.
The nature of the business may be an operational challenge, but Egerman and co-founder Andrew Cove expect Cover to improve diners' overall experience when it comes to paying for their next Brooklyn meal.

Image: Cover
Once you download the free Cover app to your smartphone and plug in some personal and credit card info, you're ready to dine at participating restaurants. There's an in-app list to guide you along the way.
As you sit down to eat, you create a "table" on the app, adding yourself and anyone in your party who's also using Cover. It prompts you to tell the waitperson or host that you're paying with the program, and at any time before paying, participants can modify their tips and how they'd like to split the bill.
At the end of the meal, the app takes care of payment and sends you a non-itemized receipt. You can just stand up, say goodnight and walk away. You probably won't even need a paper bill, unless you ask for one or the restaurant chooses to supply it.
Justin Warner, Rebel Eats star and co-head chef at Do or Dine in Brooklyn, watches the credit card shuffle nightly. And he knows it affects the restaurant's bottom line in terms of both time and money.
"If we get 15 [Cover users] per night, that's 15 minutes," he says, estimating roughly 60 seconds of processing time for individual credit card transactions. The app stands to eliminate those.
"Say, for example, I tell someone it's a 30-minute wait for a table, they might walk away," Warner says. "If I say it's going to be 15 minutes, because at the end of the day we're saving that much time and moving people along, that's great."
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In the dining room, as the old axiom goes, time is money. And Warner says he expects to save on credit card fees, too.
The app generates revenue in the industry's old-fashioned way: service charges to the restaurant. Cover says it costs less than the credit card fees that are normally imposed on bills paid with plastic (typically between 2% and 3.5%, according to some reports).
Egerman wouldn't disclose the flat rate that Cover charges, but he says it's lower than the variable rates levied by the cards — which he suggests are often much higher than 3.5%. The bottom line, he says, is when customers pay with Cover, the house keeps more of the money from the meal.

Image: Cover
Users will notice that Cover's client restaurants are confined to the higher end of New York City's dining spectrum.
"We started in New York," Egerman says. "It's the largest dining market in the country. Perhaps more importantly, it's the most prestigious and most respected dining market in the country... That said, we are growing, and our goal is not to only work at the highest end of fine dining."
Moving down market could bring Cover into more direct competition with other apps in the mobile payment space — think Dash and TabbedOut, for example. But Egerman says Cover is different from those options because it doesn't require you to check out at the end of the experience. And, he says, Cover has fine dining at the core of its service.
The app also has its sights set on the rest of the nation.
"We have lots of exciting interest from Philadelphia, Chicago and San Francisco," Egerman says. "Those are all great cities. If you were to ask me now, we're probably debating between Chicago and San Francisco."
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