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How to keep track of loans between friends without a spreadsheet
I once built a spreadsheet to track money between me and three friends. It had color coding. It had a formula that I was weirdly proud of. It lasted eleven days.
The problem wasn’t the spreadsheet itself, which was honestly kind of beautiful. The problem was that nobody, including me, ever opened it at the moment money actually changed hands. You’re standing at a food truck, your friend Dana says “can you get mine, I’ll pay you back,” and you are not pulling up Google Sheets on your phone to add a row. You’re grabbing your burrito. By the time you’re home, the details have gone soft. Was it $14 or $16? Did she pay me back for the movie already, or was that a different weekend?
So I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time trying other things. Some of them work better than others, and I think the right one probably depends on how many people you’re juggling and how much you trust your own brain.
The “I’ll just remember” method
This is where most of us start, and for one or two small loans it’s fine. Your brother owes you $30 for the gas on the drive to your aunt’s place. You’ll remember. Probably.
The trouble starts when there’s more than one thing going. Memory is generous to whoever’s doing the remembering. I’ve caught myself rounding up what people owe me and rounding down what I owe them, totally without meaning to, and I suspect almost everyone does this a little. It’s not dishonesty exactly. It’s just that your brain files “I paid” louder than “they paid.”
The other issue is that memory doesn’t hold up in a conversation. If your friend remembers it differently, you’ve got two versions of the story and no receipts, and suddenly a $25 dinner becomes a weird standoff over the group chat.
Notes apps and text threads
A lot of people I know keep a note on their phone titled something like “Money stuff” or, in my coworker Priya’s case, “WHO OWES ME.” It’s a step up. You jot down the name and the amount, and you’ve got something to point to later.
It works until the note becomes a mess. Somebody pays you back half, and now you’re crossing things out or writing “paid $20 of the $50” next to an entry from March. Then you lend them another $15, and you have to do arithmetic in your head every time you look at it. After a few months, the note is basically an archaeological dig.
Text threads are sneakier. Some people just scroll back through their messages with a friend to figure out who covered what. “Remember, I got the Uber that night.” It’s technically a record, I guess. But it’s scattered across months of memes and someone’s dog photos, and you’d need a free afternoon to reconstruct a balance from it. Venmo history has the same flavor. It’s great for proving that a payment happened, but it doesn’t tell you where things stand overall, especially if half the stuff was cash.
What actually seems to help
The thing I’ve landed on, after all this trial and error, is that you don’t really need a list of transactions. You need one number per person. Who owes whom, and how much.
That sounds obvious, but it changes how you think about it. Instead of “Dana still owes me $4 on the tacos but I owe her $20 for concert parking, so carry the whatever,” you just want to see: I owe Dana $16. Done. A running balance, not a ledger you have to audit.
You can do this on paper if you’re the type. Some folks keep a little card in their wallet with names and a single number they update each time. Honestly that’s charming and I respect it. The catch is it only works if you always have the card on you and always remember to change the number.
If you’d rather not do math at a stoplight, OweMate is built around pretty much this exact idea, one running balance per person instead of a pile of entries. When someone pays back part of what they owe, the balance just drops, and when it hits zero it gets marked as settled, which seems like a strangely satisfying little moment.
Whatever you use, the habit matters more than the tool. Log it at the moment it happens, or within the hour. That’s really the whole secret. My spreadsheet didn’t fail because spreadsheets are bad. It failed because I was trying to remember to record something at a laptop that happened at a food truck.
One more thought. However you do it, keep track of what you owe, not just what you’re owed. It’s tempting to only log the money going out, since that’s the part that stings. But a balance that only runs one direction isn’t really a balance, and friends can usually tell when you’re keeping a one-sided tally.
When Dana and I finally sat down and squared things up after my spreadsheet era, it turned out I owed her money. Not a lot. About $9. She was very gracious about it and only brought up the color coding twice.
The OweMate blog is written by the people who make OweMate, a simple way to keep track of money between friends and family.