Family Vacation Cost Sharing Spreadsheet

Spend time with family or friends, split checks, and need to figure out the bill?

Is there an app for that?

I was pretty sure this was a brilliant idea back when I first thought of it. We had spent two weeks together with family and had all spent money here and there, kept receipts and needed to see who owed whom what at the end. It’s not that easy of a spreadsheet.

But we figured it out, entered our receipts and saw that Party 1 owed Party 2 $x and Party 3 owed Party 1 $y and so on. Do other families or friends have this need on trips? What do families do when they travel together and you don’t keep a running tab on who’s paying what? Do they just Do the Math at the end like we did? Does the mathematician in the family bust out the laptop and get a spreadsheet going? What if there were an app where the different parties just had to enter their numbers and out came a number of whom to settle with so it would all be even?

Oh wait, we never did make an app. It’s a lot of work to make an app. Not to mention that important step of market research to see if others would actually shell out cold, hard cash for it. Yeah, we didn’t do that. So we didn’t build it. I wonder if there are apps for it and how they’re doing? Maybe I’ll check out the app store the next time we’re traveling and don’t know who paid for that cherry pie that first night out.

Did we buy the cherry pie or was that you?