Split a bill the way it was actually eaten. Put everyone in, add the items with their prices, tap who had what, then set the GST and the service charge. Each person gets their own items plus a fair share of the charges.
1. Who was there
2. What was on the bill
3. Charges
How it adds up
The calculator builds the bill the way a restaurant does. Start with what the food came to. GST goes on that figure, and the service charge goes on that same figure, side by side rather than one stacked on the other. Add both to the items and you have the bill.
A discount comes off after that, so it reduces the GST and the service charge along with the food rather than just the food. The calculator shows you the subtotal before the discount so you can see both figures.
Who pays for the service charge
Once you split by item, the charges have to follow. The calculator gives each person a share of the GST, service charge and any discount in proportion to what they ordered.
So if your food came to a fifth of the table's food, you carry a fifth of the service charge and a fifth of the GST. Doing that by hand for six people is the reason almost nobody splits item by item, and it is the entire reason this page exists.
If you leave an item with nobody tapped against it, it gets shared across everyone. That is usually what you want for the rice and the raita.
Doing this after every dinner
Filling in fourteen dishes is fine once. Doing it every time you eat out is not, and that is exactly why groups give up on being precise and just divide by six.
So in the Splitify app you point your camera at the bill instead. It reads the line items and the prices off the photo, you tap people onto dishes the same way you tapped names above, and the tax and service charge apportion themselves. It takes about as long as waiting for the card machine to come over.
Two things it does that a calculator cannot. It keeps the photo of the bill attached to the expense, which is what actually ends an argument three weeks later. And it remembers. A calculator hands you a number and forgets it, so somebody still has to chase four people for money. In the app the amounts sit as a running balance that carries forward, and when you do settle up it nets everything down to the fewest transfers.
Receipt scanning and item-wise splitting are both free in Splitify. In Splitwise they sit behind a subscription.
When equal splitting is fine
Often. If everyone ate roughly the same amount, divide by the number of people and stop thinking about it. Precision is not worth an argument over ₹40.
The cases where it is worth being exact:
- Drinks. The biggest one by far. Alcohol is expensive, and splitting it equally means the people who did not drink quietly subsidise the people who did, every single time.
- Someone who turned up late and had one dish while the rest of you had a full meal.
- One item that cost as much as everything else put together. The seafood platter, the imported bottle.
- Dietary differences that consistently keep one person's share well below the table average.
For one dinner none of this matters. Across a year with the same group it is real money, and it is the sort of thing people notice and never say anything about.
Same people every week?
A running ledger beats a calculator. Splitify is free for splitting.
Common questions
How do you split a bill item by item?
Work out what each person's own items come to, then give each of them a share of the GST, service charge and any discount in proportion to that subtotal. Someone whose food was a fifth of the table's food carries a fifth of the charges. The calculator on this page does that for you once you tap names onto items.
How do you calculate a bill split with tax and service charge?
Work out GST on the food total, and the service charge on that same food total, so neither is charged on top of the other. Add both to the items to get the bill. A discount then comes off that whole figure. The common mistake is charging GST on the food plus the service charge, which inflates the total.
What if two people shared one dish?
Tap both their names on that item and the amount splits between them. Anything you leave with nobody tapped against it gets shared across everyone at the table, which is normally what you want for the rice or a shared starter.
How do you split a bill when some people did not drink?
Put the drinks in as their own item and tap only the people who had them. That single change is the biggest source of unfairness in equal splitting, because alcohol is expensive and non-drinkers end up subsidising it every time.
Is there an app that does this from a photo?
Yes. Splitify reads the line items and prices off a photo of the bill, so you skip the typing and go straight to tapping people onto dishes. Receipt scanning and item-wise splitting are both free in Splitify, and it keeps a running balance between you rather than handing you a one-off number.
Is this calculator free?
Yes, no signup, and it runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere.