Splitting costs on a group holiday
A group trip generates more shared spending in a week than a shared flat does in a month, and it does it while everybody is tired, in a queue, and holding a receipt in a language they do not read. The arithmetic is not the hard part. Capturing what happened, at the time it happens, is.
Write it down at the till, not at the airport
Everything that goes wrong on a group trip's accounts goes wrong because entries were made later. Later means from memory, and memory loses the small ones — the coffees, the bus tickets, the person who covered a taxi because their card was already out. Those add up to a real number by the end of the week, and they are precisely the ones nobody can reconstruct. The habit that fixes it is entering the thing while you are still standing there. Which means the tool has to be reachable in about five seconds, from a phone, on a bad connection, by whichever of you happened to pay — not by the one person who set it up.
Not everything is split evenly
On a trip, the even split is the exception rather than the rule, and pretending otherwise is what makes people quietly annoyed. The accommodation usually is not even: a couple in a double room is not using the same amount of it as the person in the single. Weighted shares handle that — two shares against one — without anybody doing sums. Dinners often are not even either: one person had the set menu, one had a starter, one did not drink. Exact amounts per person handle that, and take about as long as reading the bill. And some costs belong to a subset. The three who went diving pay for the diving; the two who stayed at the apartment do not appear on that line at all.
Two currencies, one answer
As soon as a trip crosses a border, the record has to hold amounts in more than one currency and still produce a single set of balances. The part that matters is which rate gets used and whether the sheet says so. A rate somebody typed in from memory is the thing that gets re-argued three weeks later; a published daily reference rate, recorded against the line with the date it came from, does not get re-argued, because it is checkable. Splitsheet converts using the European Central Bank's daily reference rates and keeps the rate and its date on the entry, so a line can always say where its number came from. You pick the currency the group settles in when you start, and each entry keeps the currency it was actually paid in.
The end of the trip
The useful output at the end of a holiday is not a table of balances. It is a short list of payments. With five people and a week of spending, the balances are a tangle — three people owe, two are owed, and several of them owe each other in a loop. The list of payments that clears all of it is usually much shorter than people expect, often only two or three transfers, and it can be worked out mechanically. What you want to end with is that list, in the group chat, with the numbers on it. Then everyone opens their banking app once and it is done — because the tool does the arithmetic, not the payment.
Somebody joins on Wednesday
Trips rarely have a fixed cast. People fly in late, leave early, or come for the middle bit. The rule that keeps this simple: costs are shared by whoever the entry says they are for, not by whoever is in the group. Somebody who arrives on Wednesday appears on Wednesday's entries and not on Monday's, and the apartment is split across whoever actually slept in it. That needs a tool where an expense can name the people it was for rather than always taking everybody. It also means adding a person mid-trip should cost nothing and change nothing that came before.
Frequently asked questions
What exchange rate should a group use?
A published daily reference rate is the easiest to agree on, because nobody has to defend it. Splitsheet uses the European Central Bank's daily reference rates and records which day's rate each line used. Card charges will differ slightly from any reference rate; for splitting between friends, the difference is far smaller than the error from not recording the expense at all.
How do we handle the person who paid for everything on their card?
Enter each thing as its own line with them as the payer. Their balance climbs, and the settle-up at the end turns it into one or two payments back to them. Entering it as one lump at the end works too, but you lose the ability to say what any of it was.
What is the fewest number of payments we can settle with?
With a group of five, usually two to four. The general rule is that a group of n people can always be settled in at most n minus one payments, and often fewer, because a person who owes and is owed can be netted out entirely.
Can we keep a record of the trip afterwards?
Export it. A plain file of the rows — date, what it was, who paid, how much — is enough to answer any question later, and enough for whoever is keeping a total for next time.
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.