Trip Cost Splitter — Who Owes Whom, in the Fewest Transfers

Real-world use cases

• Settle a week-long group trip without a spreadsheet

  Four friends spend a week away. One books the Airbnb on her card, another fronts the rental car, a third covers most dinners, the fourth grabs groceries and the occasional taxi. By Friday nobody remembers the running tally. Add all four, log each expense with its real payer and the people who actually used it (the car was only three of you; one flew out early), and read off the settlement: "Jamie pays Alex $86.40, Sam pays Alex $31.10." Two transfers instead of a group-chat argument, and the cents reconcile exactly.

• Keep a shared flat fair when bills are uneven

  Three roommates split rent evenly, but the internet bill is in one name, the cleaner is paid by another, and one of you buys all the shared kitchen stuff. Log each recurring expense with the right payer and toggle who shares it (the third roommate works from a café and opts out of the coffee-pod subscription). At month end the tool tells each person their single net transfer instead of three people trying to remember six separate Venmos.

• Split a restaurant bill where people ordered differently

  A birthday dinner: ten people, one card, but three didn't drink and the guest of honour's meal is comped by everyone else. Enter the total each item-group cost, set the payer to whoever's card it went on, and toggle participants per line — the bar tab shared by seven, the cake split nine ways (everyone but the birthday person). The settlement shows each non-payer exactly what to send the one who paid, no rounding fights.

• Reconcile a team offsite or company team-building day

  A team offsite mixes personal and shared spend: the lead pays for the escape room, someone expenses lunch, a couple of people grab their own coffees that shouldn't be split. Track only the shared lines, toggle attendance per activity (two people skipped the go-karting), and produce a clean who-owes-whom list you can hand to whoever is reconciling expenses — or just collect the personal portions instantly.

• Share a live split link so everyone sees the same numbers

  Instead of screenshotting your math, hit "Share link" — the entire split (people, expenses, who-shared-what, currency) is encoded in the URL. Drop it in the group chat and everyone opens the exact same state on their own phone, can sanity- check that they were toggled into the right expenses, and sees the same final transfers. No app install, no account, no "trust me, I added it up right."

Common pitfalls

• Splitting an expense equally among the whole group when only some people used it. The taxi only three of you took should be toggled to those three, not left on "All" — otherwise the person who stayed behind silently subsidizes the ride. Always check the "Shared by" row matches who actually consumed the expense.

• Forgetting to set the right payer. The payer dropdown defaults to the first person; if you log five expenses without changing it, the tool thinks one person fronted everything and the settlement comes out backwards. Set the payer first on every line.

• Treating "is owed" and "owes" as the bill itself. The net balance is what's left after subtracting each person's own share — the person who paid the $300 hotel is only owed the part the others consumed, not the full $300. Read the net column, not the paid column, when deciding what to collect.

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