Show HN: Webapp to determine who owes you for pizza | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Webapp to determine who owes you for pizza

settleup5.appspot.com

13 pointsianxm22 comments

As a college student I would actually say that this tool is pretty very useful for keeping up with the various things I purchase for myself, for others, and that others purchase for me (e.g. Chipotle, pizza, groceries, etc.). The minimalism & simplicity are a plus. Moreover, the functionality outlined by this statement is what I find to be truly useful:

"You can cut and paste the text from the results box into an email to all your buddies that owe you or you can save the worksheet...and send a link so they can see the worksheet that you created."

The fact that everything is coordinated by name also allows for a lot of flexibility. For example, if for some reason I wanted to add multiple rows, all with the same "Person", the system assumes that these people are the same based on the name, which is what I would personally expect.

Overall, kudos for a nice simple tool.

Holy hell that is confusing.

The entire utility of using a computer to do this is to simplify things. At its current state, I may as well use a piece of paper and a calculator.

I'd recommend setting up some sort of simplified view. The person managing the house can set up all the users and bills that need to be paid, then the other housemates can just see what people are expecting them to pay and make payments accordingly.

I shouldn't have to figure out that I need to pay Mark for the rent, the system should know that I need to pay $200 as my portion of the rent, and that if Mark's already paid $800 for the rent, the $200 should go to him.

one person can fill the form in and either cut and paste the "results" text into an email to send to the others, or save it and send them a link.

I have absolutely no idea how this works. There are far too many inputs and buttons.

I used a google doc to split some payments when I went cottaging last week, so this is exactly what I was looking for. Pretty much: I drove person X and Y, so they owed me for gas, but I also bought food for 6 people, so they all owe for food, but 3 others bought food - so you write X and Y in the last column for gas, but "all" for food, for myself and those 3 others. Forget the buttons, just tab across the fields and the Ajax sorcery takes care of splitting up the bills, really handy +1.

Wait, cottaging?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottaging

Oh my, I've been saying cottaging all this time! But in my defence, I'm Canadian, see #7 here:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cottaging&...

  British/Canadian term for going to the cottage, chalet or 
  camp located in a rural or semi-rural area.

Thanks for pointing it out. Definitely saved me some embarrassment down the road, like the time I asked the cashier at the grocery store to "bag" me.

which inputs or buttons would you remove?

Here's some related functionality I need:

A group of people engage in N rounds of betting, where there is one winner per round. Each round winner is entitled to $X from all other participants for that round. Find simplest (ie fewest number of) settle-up payments at the conclusion of the N rounds. It's always harder to figure this out in real-time than it seems like it should be. Mobile app ftw.

This is really confusing. Using your example, Kali spent nothing, Matt spent 101.96, and Janet spent 70.70, but Matt still owes Janet money to settle up? Makes no sense to me.

*Edit: I think I get it now, Janet's money went to Matt initially. Seems like if the user is smart enough to figure out how to use this, he/she is smart enough to do the math independently. A fun project though, good work!

Cool. The neatest part, I think, is where you can specify who it's owed to, instead of assuming it's paid out for 'all' (everyone).

What did you build it in?

thanks.

the front end is written in haxe and compiled to js. the backend is python on google app engine.

Neat. Is this a self-learning project? Not that it's amateurish (I didn't look much at it besides clicking the link), but strikes me as that. If so, good luck

I am new to bootstrap and I guess I didn't spend much time on the ui. I built it because I thought it would be handy, and only put time into making it clean and usable, but I suppose it isn't very polished.

Great job Ian (+1'd), any plans on opening up the source code? Or writing up a tutorial?

a tutorial on how the site was made?

I'm sorry, I meant "it strikes me as a self-learning project" not "it strikes me as amateurish". Pronouns messed me up. Sorry!

Neat. Back when I had roommates, we used a spreadsheet similar to this to split our expenses. Nice to see a stab at a webapp to make it easier.

I've used Billmonk for this in the past.

https://www.billmonk.com/

cool site. I hadn't seen that before.

our group is using http://www.billsup.com for this kind of thing, keeps history and all for a running debt

that is another nice site. that and billmonk are a bit different in their goals than settleup.

settleup is meant to be a simple calculator that you can use without creating an account or logging in. if you want something to keep a history then those are good solutions, but if you just want to settle up after a trip with friends you might not want to have to create an account, and might not care about keeping a history. then you're stuck figuring it out on paper or in excel. my intent was to make settleup a little easier than excel and more convenient than other similar sites.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com