Bill-splitting spreadsheet or app
Most groups who split costs are using a spreadsheet, and most of them are right to. It is free, it does what they told it to, and nobody has to be persuaded to install anything. The interesting question is not whether a sheet works — it does — but which specific things stop working as a group gets busier, because those are the only reasons to move.
What a spreadsheet is genuinely good at
It is worth saying plainly, because the answer is "more than most apps". A sheet holds whatever shape of data you want. It does arithmetic you can read and check. It exports itself by definition. Nobody can take a feature away from it, put a limit on it, or ask you to upgrade. And every person in the group already knows how to use one. For a couple with a handful of shared bills a month, a sheet is very hard to beat, and the sensible advice is to keep it. The rest of this page is about the specific situations where it starts costing more than it saves.
Break point one: nobody enters things on a phone
This is the one that actually ends spreadsheets. Adding a row to a shared sheet on a phone, standing in a supermarket, means opening an app, finding the file, scrolling to the bottom of a grid, and typing into cells whose headings have scrolled off the top. Nobody does it. They intend to do it later, and later they have forgotten the amount. So the entries that make it into the sheet are the ones somebody sat down for, and the sheet quietly becomes a record of the large purchases only. It still adds up correctly. It is just adding up the wrong set of things.
Break point two: one person maintains it
A shared sheet is shared in the file-permissions sense. In practice one person owns it — the one who built the formulas, and the one who notices when a row is in the wrong column. That is fine until they are away, or until somebody types over a formula, or until the group grows past the point where one person can hold what everyone spent in their head. It also creates an awkward position: the person who maintains the sheet is usually the person who has to chase the settle-up, and those two jobs are much easier to do when they are not the same person's.
Break point three: the settle-up is manual
A sheet will happily tell you each person's total. Turning four totals into the payments that clear them is a separate piece of work, done by hand, every time. With two people it is subtraction. With three it needs a moment's thought. With five it is genuinely fiddly, because people owe each other in loops and the obvious answer — everyone pays everyone — is far more transfers than necessary. One poster described the monthly ritual exactly: the sheet tells them how much each has spent, and then they "make a one-off transfer in whichever direction is required to bring us even." That works for two people. It does not generalise, and generalising it is the thing a tool can do that a sheet mostly cannot.
Moving without retyping four months
The reason groups stay on a sheet past the point it is helping is that moving looks like an evening's typing. It does not have to be. If the sheet has the four columns that matter — a date, what it was, who paid, and how much — that file can be read directly, and the mapping from your column headings takes about thirty seconds. Splitsheet imports a plain file of those rows, tells you which ones it could not read rather than dropping them quietly, and gives you back the same four columns whenever you want them out again. If it turns out you preferred the sheet, you have lost nothing but the thirty seconds.
Frequently asked questions
Is a spreadsheet good enough for splitting bills?
For two people with a few shared bills a month, usually yes, and there is no reason to change. It starts costing more than it saves when nobody enters things on their phone, when one person ends up maintaining it, or when the group is large enough that working out the settle-up by hand is real work.
How do I convert my expenses spreadsheet to an app?
Export it as a plain file with a date, a description, who paid and an amount, then import that. Any tool worth moving to should let you point at your own column headings rather than demanding a particular layout, and should tell you which rows it could not read.
Can I keep using a spreadsheet alongside?
Yes, if the tool exports plain rows. That is worth checking before you move anything: a record you cannot get back out is a record you are renting.
What about a buffer for quarterly bills?
A sheet handles that well with a column of its own, and it is one of the things sheets are genuinely better at. In a running ledger the usual equivalent is to enter the quarterly bill on the day it is paid and let the balances even out over the following months.
More guides
Other things we made
Also in English, made by the same people.
Also in English, made by the same people.
Also in English, made by the same people.
Also in English, made by the same people.