Shared Expenses Spreadsheet

What is in the shared expenses spreadsheet

Two sheets, nothing hidden. You only ever type into the white cells: names, dates, descriptions, amounts, and a 1 for each person who shares a row.

• Expenses. One row per expense: date, description, amount, who paid, then a tick box column for each of up to 10 people. Put a 1 under everyone who shares that expense. Two columns calculate themselves: Split among counts the 1s on the row, and Share per person divides the amount by that count. The header row is frozen and ships with 40 blank rows plus 5 filled-in sample rows you can overwrite.
• People. One row per person, with three calculated columns: Paid adds up every expense that person paid for, Share adds up their slice of every row they were included in, and Net is paid minus share. A positive net means the group owes them. Underneath sits the Settle with the organizer table, which turns those balances into one payment per person.

Amounts and dates are already formatted for your region, so the file you download shows dollars and MM/DD/YYYY dates without you changing a setting.

How the expense splitting spreadsheet formulas work

Four plain functions do all of it, and you can read every one of them in the formula bar. Nothing is hard-coded, nothing is a pasted value, and there are no macros to enable.

Per expense

Split among = SUM(of the tick box columns on that row) and Share per person = IF(count > 0, amount / count, 0). Because the share is the amount divided by the count, the shares on a row always add back up to the amount.

Per person

Paid = SUMIF(Paid by column, this person's name, Amount column). Share = SUMPRODUCT(Share per person column, this person's tick box column), which adds the row share only where their cell holds a 1. Net = Paid - Share. Add every net together and the result is zero, which is the check printed next to the totals row.

Settling up

The first person in the People sheet is the organizer. Everyone else either pays the organizer the size of their negative net, or receives the size of their positive net, so a group of five settles in four payments. A who pays whom plan that pairs debtors with creditors directly needs to compare every balance against every other balance, which is not something a spreadsheet formula does cleanly. If you want that version, the who owes who calculator produces it in the browser.

Worked example: one month of bills between four people

These are the sample rows the download ships with, so you can open the file and follow along.

Shared expense calculator in Excel, or in your browser

A shared expense calculator Excel template is the right tool when you want a file you own, that keeps a record of the month, and that nobody needs an account to open. It is the wrong tool when the same four people keep adding expenses every week, because somebody has to be the one who opens the file, types the row and re-shares it.

If you only need one answer right now, the browser tools skip the download: who owes who calculator for a group tab, split bill calculator for a single check, split rent calculator for a monthly rent, and group trip calculator for travel. For a trip with dates and categories, the matching file is the trip expenses spreadsheet.