tabulator

Web and Android app for settling bills among groups.

Tabulator manages bills which consist of a list of items. For example, different items of food on a restaurant bill. People can share an item (for example, if they split a dessert) or several people spending the same amount can be clubbed into an item.

When it comes to paying, payments are also considered as items. Just like for the 'food' items, you can put several people contributing the same amount into the same item.

So, an item

• has a value and a currency
• is either a credit (an amount contributed) or a debit (an amount consumed)
• can be assigned to one or more participants in the group (sharing the cost)

When a bill is complete, the amount contributed (credit items) must equal the amount spent (debit items). This means the bill is 'balanced'. It doesn't mean nobody owes anyone anything, it just proves the restaurant is not owed anything.

You can run up multiple bills within the app. At any time you can see how much each person owes, and how much each person is owed, in each currency that is in use.

Tabulator doesn't work out how best to settle the bill, because this is a Hard Problem in maths. A pretty good strategy is for all the owing parties to pay the one who is owed most, then for that one to pay the remaining creditors.

Tips

Tabulous doesn't actually know anything about currencies. It just takes any non-numeric stuff you put before or after the value. So you don't need to bother with a currency symbol for your favourite (or home) currency. Tabulous does currently assume that your currency has 100 smaller units in the larger unit. Sorry Kuwait.

If you want certain types of things to be split out and shown separately in the final table, add a 'tag' to the items when you enter them. E.g. $5.00 beer Tabulator behaves as if you had a new currency '$beer'

The people who show up in the 'add item' dialog are known as the participants. To start off, there are 2 participants, Me and You. You can add new participants at any time in the settings dialog, but you can only delete participants if the app is empty of all data. When the app is empty, you can also select from a few pre-set participant lists.

Build

This is an Ionic framework app. To build it yourself

1. Install Ionic including the command line utility ionic
2. ionic start Tabulator
3. Install the Social Sharing plugin from https://github.com/EddyVerbruggen/SocialSharing-PhoneGap-Plugin
4. Overwrite files in the project with files from this repo
5. Fix .gitignore up

I may invent a more elegant way sometime.