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, nothing is sent anywhere, and there is no group to create. The trade is that nothing is saved — reloading the page starts over.

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?3Expenses can be shared by only some of them — set that per expense below.

₹12,000.00

₹

₹3,200.00

₹

₹2,400.00

₹

Who pays whom

Total spent₹17,600.00

Aman pays You₹3,466.66
Rahul pays You₹2,666.67

Show what each person paid and owes

Youpaid ₹12,000.00 · is owed ₹6,133.33
Rahulpaid ₹3,200.00 · owes ₹2,666.67
Amanpaid ₹2,400.00 · owes ₹3,466.66

Send this to the group

The link holds the whole calculation, so anyone who opens it sees these names, expenses and payments — and can change their own copy without touching yours.

Nothing is stored and nothing is sent: the calculation travels inside the link itself, after the #, which browsers never transmit to a server. Three things follow from that, and they are the trade for needing no account — the link cannot be taken back, it is a snapshot rather than a live copy, and editing afterwards makes a new one. When several people need to add their own expenses to the same running total, 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.

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, nothing is sent anywhere, and there is no group to create. The trade is that nothing is saved — reloading the page starts over.
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.