OurTab vs a shared spreadsheet
The system most households actually use.
The spreadsheet is a good system
It's free, it does exactly what you tell it, nobody can change the rules on you, and you already have one. Most households that split costs properly are running a sheet, and plenty should keep running it.
What it costs you, quietly
- Someone has to maintain it. In practice one person becomes the bookkeeper, and the system degrades the week they're busy.
- Typing the shop. Forty lines from a receipt is a job nobody does twice. So it becomes one row — "Tesco £96" — and the detail is gone.
- It doesn't know what you own. A sheet can't tell you there's already gnocchi in the cupboard, or plan Thursday's dinner.
- Phones. Spreadsheets are miserable to edit in the shop, one-handed, holding a basket.
What OurTab is really offering
Not better arithmetic — a sheet's arithmetic is fine. It's that the typing mostly disappears. Paste your supermarket order and the shop is itemised, priced and split in one go, and the same data becomes your inventory and your meal ideas. The ledger is a by-product of shopping rather than a second chore.
You can still have the spreadsheet
The fair objection to any app is that it becomes the only place your records live. So OurTab exports the whole ledger as a CSV, free, from Settings: one row per expense and per repayment, with a column for what each of you paid and what each of you owed, and the columns add up to the total so you can check our arithmetic in your own sheet. There's no paid tier for it and there won't be. How exporting works.
Where the spreadsheet is the better pick
If your split is unusual — uneven shares, rent and bills with their own rules, a joint account with its own logic — a sheet will bend to it and OurTab may not. And if your current system is working and nobody resents it, that's a real answer. Come back when the bookkeeping starts to grate.