Choosing a tool

A joint account, an app, or a spreadsheet?

Three ways to run shared money, and the honest answer is that most households need two of them. There is a free spreadsheet at the bottom of this page with the formulas already written, and no email address to hand over for it.

Updated September 20268 min read

The short version

Pick by two things: how many people, and how often money moves. Two people with four fixed bills want a joint account. Two or three people with a handful of shared costs a month want a spreadsheet. More people, or a phone at the till, and you want something that syncs.

Most households run two. A joint account for the standing orders nobody argues about, and one other thing for everything that lands on a personal card, which is most of it.

Free, no email

The spreadsheet below is a real working file with the formulas already in it. Three sheets, four example rows, and it opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets. Take it and never come back: halvy-shared-expenses.xlsx.

The three, compared honestly

Each of these is genuinely the best answer for somebody. The mistake is picking one on principle rather than on how your household actually spends.

Costs

Joint account: Free, usually
Spreadsheet: Free
An app: Free to start

Fixed monthly bills

Joint account: Ideal
Spreadsheet: Fine
An app: Fine

Something on a personal card

Joint account: Cannot see it
Spreadsheet: Type it in later
An app: Enter it there and then

More than one person entering

Joint account: Not a thing
Spreadsheet: One person, at a desk
An app: Everybody, anywhere

Who owes who

Joint account: Not applicable
Spreadsheet: Nets, routed by hand
An app: Worked out for you

Leaving with your data

Joint account: A statement
Spreadsheet: It is the file
An app: Depends on the app

	Joint account	Spreadsheet	An app
Costs	Free, usually	Free	Free to start
Fixed monthly bills	Ideal	Fine	Fine
Something on a personal card	Cannot see it	Type it in later	Enter it there and then
More than one person entering	Not a thing	One person, at a desk	Everybody, anywhere
Who owes who	Not applicable	Nets, routed by hand	Worked out for you
Leaving with your data	A statement	It is the file	Depends on the app

What each one is actually good at. The right choice is usually the joint account plus one of the other two.

The row that decides it for most people is the third one. A joint account is excellent at the money that leaves it and blind to everything else, and everything else is where the friction is.

Nobody abandons a system because the arithmetic was wrong. They abandon it because updating it was one more thing to do at eleven at night.

The free spreadsheet, and what is in it

No email, no signup, no watermark. It is a normal workbook and it is yours. Three sheets:

Expenses. Date, what it was, how much, who paid, then a column per person. Put a 1 under everybody sharing that row. Two computed columns show how many ways it split and what each person owes for it.
People. Rename anybody and the whole workbook follows, including the headers on the Expenses sheet.
Who owes who. What each person paid, what their share came to, and the net. Plus a total row whose net must read $0.00, which is how you know a row is not missing a payer.

The formulas reach row 200, so you can keep typing without touching them, and the payer column is a dropdown of the names rather than free text, because a typo there is the one mistake that produces a wrong answer without looking wrong.

Download the spreadsheet

Where it stops

The spreadsheet gives you a net figure per person and leaves you to route the payments, most negative to most positive. With four people that is a minute. It gets tedious well before it gets difficult, and the point at which it does is different for everybody, which is why this page hands you the file rather than an opinion.

Check the spreadsheet against the maths

These are the four rows the file ships with, run through the same engine the app uses. Open the spreadsheet next to this and the two should agree to the cent. If they ever disagree, trust neither and tell us.

The four rows the spreadsheet ships with. Change an amount, change who paid, or tap a name to put somebody in or out of a row.

Rent

Groceries

Concert tickets

Internet

What the spreadsheet gives you

Ana+$1,809.35

paid $2,460.00 · share $650.65

Ben-$598.05

paid $142.60 · share $740.65

Cleo-$560.65

paid $180.00 · share $740.65

Dan-$650.65

paid $0.00 · share $650.65

The step it leaves to you

Dan pays Ana $650.65

Ben pays Ana $598.05

Cleo pays Ana $560.65

The nets always add to zero, which is the check the spreadsheet does too. Nothing you type here leaves your browser.

Free tool, no signup

Who owes who calculator

The same settling step on its own, for when the ledger already lives somewhere else. Free, no signup, inputs saved on this device.

What a joint account is genuinely for

Fixed, recurring, agreed. Rent, utilities, the broadband, the insurance. Both of you pay in a standing amount and the bills come out of it, and none of those transactions ever needs discussing because they were agreed once.

It is worth doing for exactly that reason: it takes the boring 70% of shared money off the table completely. What it does not do is the dinner one of you paid for, the taxi, the thing bought while the other person was at work. Those never touch it, and they are the ones that accumulate quietly.

If you are setting the standing amount, that is its own question and it has an answer: how to split bills when one of you earns more works out what each person pays in, and how to split shared costs fairly compares the five methods and says how much the choice is worth.

When an app earns its place

More than one person has to enter things

This is the real dividing line. A spreadsheet is owned by whoever set it up, and everybody else sends them messages that get typed in later or not at all. The moment two people need to add expenses, a file on one laptop is the bottleneck.

It has to work from a phone, at the moment of paying

Anything entered later is entered from memory or from a receipt somebody kept. Most people do neither, which is how a shared ledger ends up with a gap nobody can reconstruct.

The list is long enough that opening it is a chore

Twelve rows is a spreadsheet. Two hundred rows across four people with three different splits is a thing you stop opening, and a ledger nobody opens is worse than no ledger, because everybody believes it is up to date.

And when it comes time to settle, doing it expense by expense is the expensive mistake: the fewest payments that settle everyone up is 21 transfers done the obvious way against four done properly.

Common questions

Is a spreadsheet good enough for splitting expenses?

For two or three people with a handful of expenses a month, yes, and the free one on this page does the whole job: it tracks who paid, who was in on each row, and what everybody is owed. It stops being enough when the list gets long enough that nobody wants to open it, which is usually where the honest limit is.

What is wrong with a joint account for shared costs?

Nothing, for the fixed bills that come out on the same day every month. It handles the ones nobody argues about. What it cannot do is the expense one of you put on a personal card, which is most of them, so almost every household ends up needing something alongside it.

What does the free spreadsheet actually include?

Three sheets. Expenses, where you put a 1 under everybody sharing a row. People, where renaming somebody updates the whole workbook. Who owes who, which computes what each person paid, what their share was, and the net. It works in Excel, Numbers and Google Sheets with live formulas.

Does the spreadsheet work out who should pay whom?

It gives you the net figure for each person, and you route the payments yourself from the most negative to the most positive. For four people that is a minute of work. It is the part that gets tedious first as the group grows, because the number of possible routes grows much faster than the number of people.

When is an app actually worth it over a spreadsheet?

When more than one person has to enter things, when it has to work from a phone at the till, or when the list is long enough that reopening it feels like a chore. Those three are the same underlying reason: a spreadsheet only gets updated by the person who owns it, at a desk.

Can I move my spreadsheet into an app later?

Yes, and it is worth keeping the columns as they are for that reason. A sheet with a date, an amount, a payer and a set of participants is the shape every splitting tool expects, so it imports cleanly. A sheet where the split lives in somebody’s head does not.

And if the spreadsheet stops being enough

Halvy is the same ledger with the typing done from a phone by whoever paid, the netting kept live, and the settling worked out rather than routed by hand. Free on iOS and Android, no ads, and it never asks to connect to a bank. The spreadsheet above is yours either way.

Download on theApp Store Get it onGoogle Play

The spreadsheet was checked by evaluating the real file rather than by reading its formulas: paid totals of $2,460.00, $142.60, $180.00 and $0.00 against shares of $650.65, $740.65, $740.65 and $650.65, netting to $0.00 exactly, and the app’s own engine returns the same figures on the same four rows. Comparisons above describe capabilities in general terms rather than any particular provider’s current terms, which change.