This doc can help you track and split expenses between friends, roommates, travel buddies, or more. Feel free to have a look around! We’ve put in some example data to get you started.
Quick Start
💡 Before you set up your doc, make sure you make a copy!
1. Get a clean slate
If you’re looking for a fresh start, you can wipe out all our example data, or just clear specific sections.
Clear Everything
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Clear All Expenses
Clear All Users
Clear All Categories
2. Add some friends
Use the Share button in the top right to add your cost sharing buddies.
Then, have each user press this button to start tracking their balance:
A positive balance means that you have personally spent more money than has been spent by other people for you.
A negative balance—indicated by a number in parentheses, e.g. “$(20.00)”—means that more money has been spent for you by other people than you have personally spent.
Don't worry too much about whether your personal balance is negative or positive. It’ll go back and forth as different people make purchases.
Who’s buying?
Underneath the group balance you can see a listing of who’s ahead and who’s behind in the ledger. People listed as ahead have a positive balance, and the first person listed has the highest balance. People listed as behind have a negative balance, and the first person listed has the most negative balance. You can hover over a person in either list to see exactly what their balance is.
We’ve found that this is useful when deciding who should pay for large group purchases. The person who appears first in the “behind” list will typically pay, since they have the lowest balance, and that way the group deviation stays fairly low.
, you can also see the ledger status. Normally, you’ll see a green indicator if everything adds up properly. If the counts come out of balance, the indicator will turn red and a message will tell you how large the error is.
This is probably caused by an entry where the "Purchased by" or "For" column is empty by accident. Make sure you fix this!
You can also see the Group deviation. When this is high, there is a larger imbalance in spending among the users.
Settling up
At some point you may decide that it’s time to cash out. To minimize confusion, here’s our recommended strategy for settling up:
Pick one person to handle all the money.
Each person who has a negative balance should pay their remaining balance to the money holder.
Then, the money holder should pay out all positive balances to those people.