Smart Debt Settler

Doing accounting after a night out with your friends can become an excessive pain. When multiple people cover for different bills throughout the night, and when the bill isn’t split evenly between those involved in the expense, making sure that everyone gets their money back fairly becomes exponentially messy as the number of bills and people increase. Handling the money flow after one of these nights out bothered me so much that I decided to find a way to algorithmically automate the process so I would never have to waste time on this in the future.

I built a tool that uses a max heap and min heap to outline the minimum payments needed for everyone to settle up within seconds (Method from this video), saving countless hours of my life in the future. This function is similar to Splitwise’s debt simplification feature, but Splitwise requires all users to have downloaded their app in order to use this. I can perform this debt simplification independently using my tool.

I initially considered using the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm to perform this (based on this article about Splitwise’s debt simplication method), but in the end I thought this was a little overkill and found a much easier time just using heaps to accomplish the same thing. I also used ChatGPT to handle the UI/data input code because I wanted to focus more on the data handling rather than how to parse the text inputs.