Split the bill and settle by Interac e-Transfer

In Canada the paying-back part is already solved. Interac e-Transfer is in every banking app, it's free at most institutions, and money arrives in minutes. Nobody needs a third-party wallet and nobody needs to think about it.

Which is exactly why the friction sits somewhere else. The hard part of splitting a bill was never sending the money. It's working out how much each of six people owes off a receipt with shared plates, a bottle of wine, tax on some lines and not others, and a tip on top.

Set up Autodeposit first

If you're the one who fronts the bill, register your email or phone number for Autodeposit in your banking app before you need it. Transfers then land straight in your account with no security question attached.

Without it, collecting from five people means five security questions, and at least one of them will be answered with a word you did not agree on. It's a one-time setup and it removes the single most annoying part of being the person who paid.

Requesting money works, one person at a time

Most Canadian banking apps have a Request Money function, and it's a good way to make the amount unambiguous. What it will not do is split a request across a group: you send one request per person, each with its own number.

So you still need those numbers first, and that's the part worth automating.

Getting the amounts right off the receipt

Three things make bill splitting go wrong, and none of them are about payment:

• Shared items. The bottle of wine and the plates in the middle belong to some people and not others.
• Tax that isn't uniform. Alcohol, prepared food and groceries can carry different rates on one receipt, so an even split of the tax line quietly overcharges whoever drank water.
• The tip. Applied to the pre-tax or post-tax total, depending on who's arguing.

If you already know what everyone paid and just want the settlement, the who owes who calculator runs in your browser and returns the shortest list of transfers that squares the group. No signup.

Doing it with a shared link

The version with the least admin: one person scans the receipt with dvup and shares a link. Everyone else opens it in their phone's browser, taps the items they had, and the page shows them their own total along with your e-Transfer address to send it to.

Two things worth being precise about. Your friends install nothing and make no account, because the link is a normal web page. And dvup does not move the money: it hands the payer your address and the exact amount, and the transfer happens in their banking app, between their bank and yours, the way it already did.

The link expires after about a day, and anything nobody claims stays on the person who paid.

Rent and the standing bills

For a household the calculation isn't the problem, the repetition is: the same transfer, every month, plus the bills that change. Check your bank's e-Transfer limits before you rely on it for a full month's rent, since the caps are per-institution and rent is the one amount that gets close to them.

The guide to splitting rent with roommates covers picking a method, and the rent split calculator does the arithmetic once so you can set it and stop redoing it.

Questions