Roommates
How to Split Bills With Roommates: Rent, Utilities and Groceries
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The setup that survives a year of shared renting: one Telegram group with SplitFast in it, rent split by room size, utilities split evenly, groceries split only between the people who actually eat them, and one settle-up a month. Nobody keeps a spreadsheet, nobody plays accountant, and the 11 p.m. receipt argument stops happening.
How it usually falls apart
Picture the flat chat at 11:40 p.m. Someone drops a photo of a 62-dollar supermarket receipt with the words "let’s just split it three ways". Three people live there. One of them has been eating off their own shelf for two weeks and did not touch a single thing in that bag. They know it. The other two have genuinely forgotten.
Two things can happen now. Either they say nothing and quietly bank the resentment until it comes out over eleven dollars in March, or they type "I didn’t have any of that", and everyone is recalculating a grocery run at midnight.
The same conversation returns every week because the decision gets made from scratch every week. Agreeing once and putting the rule into the app takes about five minutes.
Decide what is even and what is not
A shared flat almost never divides cleanly by head. Rooms are different sizes, one person works from home with the heating on, another disappears to their parents for half of every month.
An agreement that holds up looks roughly like this:
- Rent — by room. The big room with the balcony costs more than the one that fits a bed and a regret.
- Electricity, internet, water — evenly, unless someone is running a small data centre.
- Groceries and household stuff — only between people in the shared pot.
- Personal deliveries, personal shampoo — never in the group at all.
The first two take an evening to settle. The third is where nearly every roommate fight starts, and it is the one people forget to discuss.
Setting it up
Put the bot in the flat chat
Ten seconds, step by step here. Your roommates are pulled in from the chat itself, so nobody registers an account or hunts for anyone’s phone number.
Set Default Portions for the everyday stuff
Groceries and household things happen several times a week, so tune the defaults to those. Open Settings → Default Portions and set each roommate’s share with the +/− stepper. Everyone starts at 1. Give a 0 to whoever cooks for themselves, and they stop appearing in new expenses by default — scanned receipts included, hand-typed items included. One tap brings them back into a single expense on the day they take a jar of coffee from the shared bag.
Log rent once a month with room-sized portions
Whoever sends the money to the landlord logs the whole amount and sets portions 3 : 2 : 2. Rent is one expense a month, so setting shares by hand there costs nothing and keeps the ratio visible to everyone.
Let receipts do the typing
Big supermarket runs are worth photographing. The receipt comes back as a list of items you can hand out line by line, which matters when half the bag is shared and half is somebody’s protein powder. Full walk-through in the itemised splitting guide.
A month in actual numbers
Three roommates. Alex has the big room, Sam and Nina have the small ones. Nina buys her own food.
| Expense | Amount | Paid by | Split |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rent | 2,100 | Alex | 3 : 2 : 2 → 900 / 600 / 600 |
| Electricity + internet | 135 | Sam | evenly, 45 each |
| Groceries for the month | 372 | Alex | Alex and Sam, 186 each |
At the end of the month the balances net down to two payments: Sam sends Alex 696, Nina sends Alex 645. Nobody sat down with a calculator, and nobody had to remember who bought the toilet paper in week two.
Guests, and the roommate who leaves
A friend staying for the weekend does not need to join the group. The roommate who invited them takes their share: two portions instead of one on the food that week, done.
When someone moves out, settle on their last day rather than "sometime later". Balances are already netted into the smallest set of transfers, so it is one payment and a clean exit. Then drop their portions to 0 and the flat carries on without them showing up in next week’s grocery run.
Five minutes tonight
Add @SplitFastBot to the flat chat, set the portions while everyone is home, and log the next thing anybody buys. The first month runs itself, and the receipt argument at 11:40 p.m. simply never comes back.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best expense app for roommates?
One that nobody has to install. SplitFast runs inside Telegram: add @SplitFastBot to the group chat your flat already has, and everyone in that chat becomes part of the expense group. It handles even splits, portions for uneven ones, exact amounts and line-by-line receipt splits, then nets the month into a couple of transfers.
How do you split rent when one roommate has a bigger room?
Give the rooms shares instead of splitting per head. A big room and two small ones is usually 3 : 2 : 2, so rent of 2,100 comes out as 900 / 600 / 600. Log rent once with those portions and the same ratio applies every month.
One roommate buys their own food. How do we keep them out of grocery splits?
Set their Default Portions to 0. From then on they are never added to a new expense automatically, whether someone scans a supermarket receipt or types an item in by hand. When they do take something from a shared bag, one tap puts them back into that single expense.
Does everyone in the flat need to install something?
No. The whole thing lives in Telegram, which your flat chat is already on. Expenses, balances and reminders show up in the group, and each roommate can open the app to see who owes what.
