Back in the days before Excel and other spreadsheet programs, I frequently took on the chore of dividing and allocating expenses for group trips. I did it manually, often on a paper bag or a piece of cardboard from a box.
I had one set of columns for the expenses paid by each person. Each participant had a vertical column, and each expense was on a row. This part of the spreadsheet provided a total amount of expenses paid by each participant at the bottom of each column.
Then I had a second set of columns, usually to the right of the first set, which allocated each expense between the participants. For example, in a five person trip, one expense might be divided between only two participants, and the next expense might be divided between all five participants. This part of the spreadsheet provided a total amount of expenses allocated to each participant at the bottom of each column.
Then I would calculate the difference between the total amount paid by each participant, and the total amount allocated to each participant. For example, one participant may have paid $360 more than the amount of expenses allocated to them, and another participant may have paid $75 less than the expenses allocated to them. To determine if I had made any calculation errors, I would add up the total expenses paid and the total expenses allocated. If I was lucky, those numbers were the same.
In some cases, the easiest way to handle the cash exchanges was for me to act as banker. Everybody who owed money would write me a check or give me cash, and then I would write checks and/or give cash to the people who were owed money. In other cases, it worked to have several people who owed money directly pay somebody who had paid a lot of expenses, such as a shuttle or bush pilot fee, and then make whatever minor adjustments were necessary to make the payments come out right.
This is a low tech way of handling trip finances. You can do with a dull pencil when crammed in the back seat of a vehicle while driving home. A pocket calculator or calculator app comes in handy. But if somebody comes up with a fancy spreadsheet which does all the calculations automatically, you could do the same thing a bit faster and with fewer calculation errors on a laptop or a tablet during the drive back.
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