Settle Up (who pays whom)
After a holiday, a shared house month, or a stretch of siblings covering a parent's costs, everybody has paid for different things and nobody can work out who owes what. Paste the expenses — what it was, how much, who paid, and how it splits — and this works out each person's total paid, their total share and their balance, then reduces the whole tangle to a short list of payments: who pays whom, and how much. It splits equally, by shares (one person's share twice another's, for rent by room or a car by mileage) or by exact amounts, and somebody who paid for something they were not part of is handled properly. All arithmetic is in whole pennies: when an amount will not divide evenly the leftover pennies are handed out one each to the first people named, so a split always adds back to exactly what was spent. The payments are then applied back to the balances and every position is proved to land on exactly zero. It moves no money, contacts nobody, and gives no financial advice.
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Inputs
- Currency symbol
$ / £ / € / ¥ / ₹ / kr / none - Per-expense breakdown
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Frequently asked
What format do the lines take?
what it was | amount | who paid | how it splits. Separate the fields with a pipe, semicolon or tab; a comma works too, but only on a line that uses none of those. The split can be left blank or 'all' for everyone, a list of names for an equal split between those people, 'Ana:2 Bo:1' for shares, or 'Ana:12.50 Bo:7.50' for exact amounts. Currency signs are ignored, so '£84.50' reads fine.
How does it know if 'Ana:2' means shares or £2?
A number with a decimal point or a currency sign is read as an exact amount; a bare number is read as a share. If that is not what you meant, write 'shares:' or 'exact:' in front of the list and it will do exactly what you say. It is the only guess the parser makes, and you can always overrule it.
What happens to the odd penny?
It is handed out. £10.00 between three people is 3.34, 3.33, 3.33 — the leftover pennies go one each to the first people named on that line, and the parts always add back to exactly £10.00. A tool that rounded each share to 3.33 and quietly lost a penny would be wrong in a way nobody notices until the numbers refuse to reconcile.
Is this the smallest possible number of payments?
It is a short one, and it is proved to settle everybody. It first matches anyone who owes exactly what somebody else is owed, then repeatedly settles the largest debt against the largest credit, which never needs more than one payment per person minus one. Finding the provably smallest set is a genuinely hard computing problem, and the tool says a short set rather than claiming the shortest.
How do I know the answer is right?
Check it. Every expense is listed with each person's share worked out line by line, so anyone who disagrees with one line can find it. The totals then have to reconcile: everything paid equals everything owed, and applying the listed payments to the balances leaves every single person on exactly zero. That last check is run every time and printed in the output.
Somebody paid for something they weren't part of.
That is handled — leave them out of the split. They paid, they owe nothing toward it, and the settlement gives it back to them. It is the usual case of one person covering another's ticket or prescription.
Does it matter how I capitalise names?
No. Ana, ana and ' Ana ' are the same person, and extra spaces inside a name are ignored too. The first spelling you typed is the one shown in the results. Two genuinely different people do need different names, though — if two Anas are splitting a bill, call them something the tool can tell apart.
Should I keep my records in here?
No — keep the running record in the Shared Expense Splitter as things happen. That ledger deliberately never computes a split, because real splits get adjusted for who wasn't there and what everyone agreed at the time, and a formula would overwrite all of that. This tool is the other half: paste the finished list in once, at the end, when you are ready to square up.
Can I use it for something other than a holiday?
Yes. Housemates over a month, siblings splitting a parent's care costs, a group buying a present, a car shared by mileage, rent split by room size — anything where several people paid for different things and the shares are not all equal. The shares option is what makes the uneven cases work.