SplitExpense Help Center

How to get started?

Use the "Generate New" function in the Add-on menu and hit the Sample button. This creates an example sheet with notes to explain the different fields and tables. Once you have familieries yourself with the layout you can use the "Generate New" function again to make your own sheet for your group.

How to generate an expenses sheet?

Use the "Generate New" function in the Add-on menu. Here you add an initial list of names, seperated by new lines, and a corresponding 1-character long symbols, also seperated by new lines. You can choose to overwrite the currently active sheet or to create a new one. Use the Generate button.

How do I Install SplitExpense?

Go to the Add-ons menu in any Google Sheets Spreadsheet and click on "Get add-ons" .Search for SplitExpense and add it to your sheets. Alternatively you can get it from the Chrome Webstore.

How do I access SplitExpense?

All functionalities can be accessed from the Add-ons menu once the Add-on has been installed.

What is the user Table?

The user table is at the top of the sheet and contains the list of users, their symbols, the dates on which they are present, the amount they have spent, the amount they have consumed, and their balance. Positive numbers means they are owed money and negative numbers reflect that they are owed the specified amount. The values and balances get calculated automatically.

What are the expenses Tables?

Every user has a corresponding expenses table which represents a list of the items bought by the user, a list of symbols representing the consumers of said item, the price, the price per person, the date of purchase, and a comment. Add your expenditures here.

How do I add a user?

Use the "Add User" function from the add-on menu. Simply enter the name and a one character symbol of the new user. The date is added as the current date so that only expenses from today onwards are attributed to the new user. Change this date if you necessary.

How do I remove a user?

You can't remove a user from a sheet. Just get them to pay off their balance to another user and record the transaction. Then set them as having left in the dates column. E.g 0~2018-04-01 where the first of April is the day they left.

What's the date column and how do I use it?

The date column in the user table contains a list of date ranges during which the user is said to have consumed items. The general format is FromDate1~ToDate1;FromDate2~ToDate2; and so forth with dates in the ISO format:

yyyy-mm-dd~yyyy-mm-dd;yyyy-mm-dd~yyyy-mm-dd

There are some special cases: Instead of an ISO date, a 0 represents the "beginning of time" (1970) and a * represents the current date. For example 2018-02-20~* means the user was present from the 20th Feb onwards.

A single * instead of a date range means always. I.e. * is equivalent to 0~*

Users who are not marked as being present on the date of an expense will not be charged for it!