How do you calculate who owes whom in a group?

Add up what each person paid, work out what each person's fair share is, and the difference is their balance. People with a negative balance pay people with a positive one. Netting those balances first means far fewer payments than settling each debt separately.

How do you split expenses when not everyone shared them?

Split each expense only among the people it was actually for, then net everyone's balance across all of the expenses. Dividing the grand total by the number of people gets this wrong the moment one cost was not shared by the whole group.

Do I need an account to use this?

No. It runs entirely in your browser and there is no group to create — the calculation lives in the page's own link, not in an account. The one thing that leaves your browser is sharing: pressing Share saves the encoded calculation against a short code so the link is short enough to paste into a chat, and anyone with that link can read it.

Can other people add their own expenses?

Not on this page — it is a calculator for one person filling it in. If everyone needs to add their own as the trip happens, create a Splitly group and share the link; that needs no account either.

Group expense calculator

One card per person, their expenses inside it. Mark anything only some of you shared, and it works out who pays whom — without creating a group or an account.

How many people?3Set the group before the money goes in — it cannot change afterwards, so nobody's share moves once it has been agreed.

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Who pays whom

Name at least two people and add what they paid for.

Send this to the group

You get a short link — the kind that survives being pasted into a chat. Anyone who opens it can read the calculation and add to it.

While you type, nothing is stored and nothing is sent: the calculation lives inside the link in your address bar, after the #, which browsers never transmit to a server. Pressing Share is the one thing that sends it — a link short enough to paste into a message needs somewhere to keep what it stands for, so the encoded calculation is saved against a short code. From then on everyone holding that link is editing the same calculation — your changes go out as you make them, theirs come back, and nobody has to send the link again. “Stop syncing” above takes this tab out of it. Two things follow, and they are the trade for needing no account: a shared link cannot be taken back once it is out, and anyone it reaches can change the numbers, with no record of who changed what. When you need that record, or people who cannot all be trusted with the same link, that is what a Splitly group is for.

Why it is laid out by person

This is the conversation at the end of a trip, and that conversation goes round the table: “Tom, what did you pay for?” Nobody reconstructs a holiday receipt by receipt from memory — they do it person by person, because that is how people remember spending money.

So the screen is a card per person with their expenses inside it, rather than a list of expenses each asking who paid. It is the same arithmetic either way; it is the order of the questions that decides whether filling it in feels like work.

Expenses only some of you shared

This is the part a total-per-person calculator cannot do, and the part that makes most group answers quietly wrong. One person skipped the museum. Two shared a room the others did not. A taxi carried three of the five.

Every expense here starts shared by everybody, because that is the common case. Open the people button on a row to untick whoever was not part of it, and only they are charged for it — the rest of the settlement adjusts around it.

The fewest payments, not every debt

Five people owing each other in every direction is twenty possible payments. Netting the balances first collapses that to at most four, which is the difference between a settlement that happens on the last evening and one that does not happen at all.

The arithmetic is the same optimiser a Splitly group uses, in integer paise with the remainder distributed rather than rounded away, so the payments always add back to exactly what was spent.

When to use a group instead

Use this when the money has already been spent and you are working it out afterwards. It holds nothing: no account, no link, and reloading the page starts over.

Use a group when the trip has not happened yet, when more than one person will be adding expenses, or when you want the running total to be there tomorrow. If you only have one total per person and no itemising to do, the settle-up calculator is fewer boxes to fill in.

This works out one trip after the fact. A Splitly group does it as it happens — everyone adds what they paid, and the settle-up list is always current.

Create a group — it's free

Frequently asked questions

How do you calculate who owes whom in a group?: Add up what each person paid, work out what each person's fair share is, and the difference is their balance. People with a negative balance pay people with a positive one. Netting those balances first means far fewer payments than settling each debt separately.
How do you split expenses when not everyone shared them?: Split each expense only among the people it was actually for, then net everyone's balance across all of the expenses. Dividing the grand total by the number of people gets this wrong the moment one cost was not shared by the whole group.
Do I need an account to use this?: No. It runs entirely in your browser and there is no group to create — the calculation lives in the page's own link, not in an account. The one thing that leaves your browser is sharing: pressing Share saves the encoded calculation against a short code so the link is short enough to paste into a chat, and anyone with that link can read it.
Can other people add their own expenses?: Not on this page — it is a calculator for one person filling it in. If everyone needs to add their own as the trip happens, create a Splitly group and share the link; that needs no account either.