The spreadsheet we’re replacing

Since 2022, every shared purchase in our house has gone into a spreadsheet.

It’s a good spreadsheet. At the start of each month the template tab gets duplicated and cleared. Each purchase gets a row: the date, the store, the cost, who bought it, what kind of spending it was, and a checkbox for whether it’s been paid back. Two more columns make it ours. One holds anything that was only for one of us, and the other holds anything that was only for the other.

Our split is 50/50, with exceptions. Most receipts are simple. A Save-On-Foods run for $26.52 is shared, and so is a $37.22 pizza. Then a Home Depot receipt comes in at $67.35 and $17.35 of it was one person’s, so that goes in the “only” column and $50.00 gets split. A $26.90 Dollarama trip turns out to be entirely one person’s.

Over four years, more grew up around the monthly tab. A pie chart sorts the month into eleven categories. Costco runs get their own small tables. Gas has its own sheet, and so do the mortgage calculations. Then there’s a sheet called “Backyard Reno”, which doesn’t belong to any month at all. It started when the project started and it’ll end when the project’s done.

Honestly, it works well.

What it can’t do is keep up. The receipts pile up. The plan is always to go over last month at the start of the new one, and in practice it slides to the middle of the next month, sometimes to the end. Then it takes a Saturday morning: the stack of receipts, reading each one, typing in the lines, deciding what was shared and what wasn’t, and checking the arithmetic.

There was no single moment that made us start. The review was just always late, and by the time a month was settled we were well into the next one.

What we kept

We didn’t go looking for another app first. We already had a system we liked, and what we wanted was that system without the Saturday. So EvenHearth starts from the sheet.

The split stays, and so do the exceptions. Any line on a receipt can be one person’s, shared on the household split, or divided some other way.

The receipt itself becomes the input. You photograph it, EvenHearth reads the lines into a draft, and a person checks it before it counts.

The template tab becomes a month that opens by itself. The pie chart becomes the month’s analysis. The “Paid” checkbox becomes a month close: who owes whom, and a record of the payment you made to each other.

“Backyard Reno” becomes a venture. A project or a trip gets its own ledger and its own settlement, separate from the household month, the way that sheet always was.

What we changed

The timing. A purchase goes in when it happens, while the receipt is still in your hand, instead of three weeks later in a pile.

We still use the spreadsheet. This fall, our household moves over to EvenHearth.