Tabulator

Tabulator is an app which keeps track of debts between a group of people over some event, like a weekend break. I made it for the Colonel's Regiment, which includes a number of Yorkshiremen and others disposed to working such things out exactly.

You can run it in your browser, or if you have a suitable device, install it like a normal application. It should work offline once installed; however I haven't completely figured out localStorage, which means that you may find all your data wiped without warning. (Deleting your browser data and using iOS appear to be the main causes.) So don't use it for anything too important at this stage.

Tabulator doesn't access your contacts. You can represent people by their initials or some other meaningful tag. It's also completely offline once you've loaded it.

The Colonel's Regiment

Tabulator web application, version 0.9

Why is this new?

Honestly, it isn't. It's a rewrite of an Android app I made in 2014 or thenabouts, which I did mainly to learn PWAs and SvelteKit. If you want a professional app then you could try Splid (which in my defence, my original app predates)

SvelteKit

Splid

How to use it

For each bill, you enter in what everyone had (or at least what it cost) and what everyone contributed, and it calculates who owes and who is owed. If the eventual amount owed can't be evenly divided then the app rounds cents in favour of whoever is owed the most.

It doesn't matter who specifically owes what money to whom, as long as everyone ends up redeemed at the end, and how to do this in the best way turns out to be a Hard Problem in maths which I haven't tried to solve. In our group we generally pay off whoever is owed most and then sort out the remaining debts.

Tips

Say you're in a restaurant and have eaten $80 worth of food. So there are some items on the right hand (debt) side of the bill page which add up to $80. Right now the bill is unbalanced because we haven't put in who has paid for anything.

When a bill is unbalanced like this, Tabulator provides an extra button which automatically adds a credit of the amount needed.

But what if you decide to throw in a $100 bill and leave the extra $20 as a tip? If you add the $100 on the credit side, and now the bill is unbalanced the other way. Tabulator's extra button now works the othe way, automatically adding a debt which you can split among the satisfied diners.

In this situation Tabulator also tells you what percentage tip you are leaving.

Currencies

Currently, Tabulator doesn't know about currencies. So when you leave a country, you'll need to write down the final standings in that currency and wipe the app for the next one. Some options are

Extend the app to support more than one ongoing tabulus, each with a currency

Provide a history of recent tabuli

Have multiple currencies on the go in a single tabulus

I should dig more into what people need here.

TODO: (3211) currencies