Ask HN: How do you manage chores, bills, and guests with your roommates? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you manage chores, bills, and guests with your roommates?

10 pointsmatthodan7 comments

I live with several roommates and we're always complaining that we need a better system to manage chores, bills, and guests. I've been looking at several services, including easyroomin.com and billmonk.com, but neither stand out as particularly great solutions. Easyroomin looks way too complicated and Billmonk doesn't do everything we want.

How do you manage chores, bills, and guests with your roommates?

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I manage a house with 4 tenants, seven total including girlfrinds and myself. All the chores are split up evenly. They include, garbage (bag to can, can to street and back) recycling (collected, brought to street on time) Kitchen (Cleanliness, sink, dishwasher, refrigerator) Bills (diving bills, collecting rent and utilities, paying bills). So far things are cleaner and more organized, moral is higher also. I am in charge of bills. I use excel and a calculator to total up all house expenses and write them on a sheet of paper with a pen, collect money and pay bills. Very simple.

Google Docs spreadsheet, one sheet per month, with shared write access. Easy to handle both recurring expenses and one-offs (hypothetical keg party, hypothetically broken window from hypothetical keg party). Also easy to factor in percentage shares -- we go based on relative income because some of us make 2x what others do, but we're redistributionists like that. Only downside is that people who aren't typical hyper-fastidious programmer types may accidentally mess with the formatting or formulas without realizing it.

I live with a girl (non-girlfriend) and she worries about all this and occasionally I get a nagging post it note to do something.

WePay can handle the bills/rent side of things. http://www.wepay.com

I'm actually working on my first web app where you can tally and split costs among roommates and then either email or tweet them a link to a bill showing what they owe you. There won't be any payment engines because I figure you'll either get cash or beer as payment.

1. Hire someone to come in every week or two to help do cleaning.

2. Figure out approximately what bills come to every month, and get everyone to pay that much along with rent. And then don't sweat it.

Checkout http://www.billboxit.com/ I've got a buddy who has been using it with his roommates and says it's pretty good!

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