Who owes who calculator
Turn a pile of shared expenses into the shortest list of payments that settles them.
Expenses
Add at least one expense with an amount to see who owes who.
After a trip, the problem is rarely the arithmetic. It is that eleven receipts across five people turn into a tangle where everyone owes everyone a little, and nobody wants to send four separate payments.
Enter each expense, who paid it, and who it was shared between. The calculator works out each person's net position and then reduces it to the shortest practical list of payments.
Why the list is shorter than you expect
If Ana owes Ben $20 and Ben owes Cal $20, the money can go straight from Ana to Cal and Ben never has to touch it. Applied across a whole trip, this collapses what looks like a dozen debts into two or three transfers.
The rule is simple: work out what each person is up or down overall, then repeatedly have the person furthest down pay the person furthest up. That always finishes in at most one payment fewer than there are people, and usually far fewer.
Net position, not a running tally
The calculator does not track who owes whom on each individual receipt. It tracks one number per person: total paid out, minus their share of everything they took part in. Someone who paid for nothing but ate every meal is down by their share; someone who put the hotel on their card is up by everyone else's share of it.
Those numbers always add up to zero, which is a useful check. If a set of expenses does not net to zero, something has been entered twice or somebody has been left out of a split.
Rounding on shared expenses
Each expense is split among its participants with the leftover cent assigned rather than discarded, so the totals reconcile exactly. Across a long trip that is the difference between settling up cleanly and having a balance that ends in an unexplained few cents.
Questions
- How do you work out who owes who after a trip?
- Calculate each person's total spend, subtract their share of the group's expenses, and you have their net position. People with a negative net pay people with a positive one until everyone is at zero.
- How do I settle up with the fewest payments?
- Pay from the largest debtor to the largest creditor and repeat. This is what the calculator does, and it needs at most one payment fewer than the number of people involved.
- What if someone didn't take part in every expense?
- Set the participants for each expense individually. Anyone not listed on a given expense has no share of it, and their net position is unaffected.
- Why do the balances have to add up to zero?
- Because every dollar someone paid is a dollar someone else owes. A non-zero total means an expense was entered twice, an amount is wrong, or someone was left off a split.
- Can I keep this running instead of settling at the end?
- That is what the Make It Even app is for. The calculator handles one settlement; a group keeps the balance live, handles multiple currencies with the exchange rate from each expense's own date, and lets everyone add expenses as they go.
When one calculation isn’t enough
A calculator answers a single question. Make It Even keeps the answer current: add expenses as they happen, split each one however it needs to be split, and everyone sees the running balance. It handles multiple currencies using the exchange rate from each expense’s own date, so old totals never drift.
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