Who owes who calculator
List what each person paid for, the way you would in the app. You get the shortest way to square up, so nobody sends five separate transfers to settle one dinner.
Who's splitting
What got paid for
Who owes who
- AlexpaysJordan$42.30
- SampaysJordan$19.80
$198.90 across 3 people is $66.30 each. 2 payments settle it.
One dinner, way too many transfers
A few people cover different things and you end up with a tangle of little IOUs. Alex grabbed the cab. Sam covered the drinks. You got stuck with the actual bill (the big one, obviously). Pay all of that back one payment at a time and it's a dozen transfers for a single night out. This nets it down to the fewest payments that make everyone even: five people never need more than four payments. It's the same math dvup runs inside the app, and if you want to see how it works, we wrote up the math behind simplify debts.
How to use it
Add everyone who is splitting, then add a row for each thing somebody paid for. The settle-up updates as you type. Each person keeps one colour the whole way through: the chip, the row, the bubble and the payment. Bubbles are sized by how far off even someone is, and the amount inside is green if they are owed and red if they owe. It assumes an equal split. If some people should owe more or less, that's what uneven and itemized splits in the app are for.
When it's the same people every time
This is great for a one-off. Once it's a group you keep splitting with, like roommates or a partner, dvup keeps a running balance that doesn't reset. It reads your receipts and lets everyone pay their share right there. You can also split the rent with the rent calculator or read our take on splitting rent with roommates.
Questions
How does the who-owes-who calculator work?
List the expenses the way they actually happened: what it was, who paid, how much. It totals each person, splits the whole thing evenly to see where everyone lands, then works out the shortest set of payments that squares the group up. So instead of everyone paying everyone, you get one clean set of who-pays-who.
What does it mean to simplify debts?
Say you owe Sam, Sam owes Alex, and Alex owes you. That loop can mostly cancel out. Simplifying debts nets all of it down to the fewest transfers, which means fewer payments to send and a lot less confusion.
Is this bill-splitting calculator free?
Yes, and there's nothing to sign up for. It runs right here in your browser. If it's the same group over and over, the dvup app remembers every expense and does the chasing for you.
Keep the whole group in sync
dvup keeps the running total for the whole group and reads receipts off a photo. Open it and who-owes-who is already sorted. Free on iOS and Android.