How to split a restaurant bill with friends
Splitting a bill is rarely about the money. It is about nobody feeling quietly overcharged and nobody having to say so out loud. Here is how the four common methods actually work, when each is worth using, and where the arithmetic usually goes wrong.
Split it evenly
Divide the total by the number of people. It takes five seconds and it is the right answer far more often than the internet suggests — if everybody ate roughly the same amount and drank roughly the same amount, the difference between an even split and an exact one is a euro or two, and the five minutes spent recovering that euro cost more than the euro.
It stops being the right answer when the spread is wide, and it is almost always the same two situations: somebody is not drinking, or somebody ordered the one expensive thing on the menu. A person on tap water who pays a fifth of a wine bill has been charged for a bottle they did not open. They will usually say nothing, and they will remember.
Pay for what you had
Everybody pays for their own items. It is the fairest method and the most tedious one, because somebody has to read the receipt aloud and everybody has to remember what they ordered forty minutes ago.
Two things make it harder than it looks. Shared dishes — the starters, the bottle of wine, the side everybody picked at — do not belong to one person, so they have to be divided again inside the split. And service charge and tax are printed as one line at the bottom, so they have to be spread back across everybody in proportion to what they had, or the person who ordered the cheapest thing pays the same service charge as the person who ordered the steak.
One person pays, everybody settles up after
The most common method in practice, and usually the best one at the table: one card, one transaction, no queue at the terminal. The bill is then somebody's problem for the next few days.
This is where money actually gets lost. Not through unfairness but through forgetting — the person who paid does not want to chase anybody, the amounts are small enough to feel awkward to ask for, and after a week nobody is quite sure what the number was. Whatever else you do, write the number down before you leave the restaurant.
Take turns
You pay this time, I pay next time. It works well for two people who eat together often and badly for everybody else, because it only balances if the meals are roughly equal and roughly as frequent — and it silently transfers money to whoever eats out more.
It is worth naming because it is often chosen by default rather than deliberately. If you have taken turns for a year and one of you has picked up noticeably more dinners, taking turns has stopped being a method and become a subsidy.
Tax, service and tip
The single most common arithmetic mistake is splitting the food by item and then splitting the service charge evenly. Service is a percentage of the bill, so splitting it evenly quietly moves money from the cheap orders to the expensive ones — which is exactly the unfairness the itemised split was meant to fix.
The correct treatment is proportional: if your food came to 20% of the food total, you owe 20% of the service charge. The same applies to tax where it is added at the end rather than included, and to a tip agreed as a percentage.
platy24 does this automatically. Tax, service and tip lines are marked as surcharges rather than as items nobody can claim, and each one is spread across everybody in proportion to what they actually had.
Doing it without an app
You do not need software for a table of three with similar orders. Divide the total, round up to something convenient, and move on.
You start needing something at about five people, or when the orders are uneven, or when the bill is one of several over a weekend. That is the point at which the arithmetic stops being one division and becomes a small ledger — and a small ledger kept in four people's heads is a small ledger that disagrees with itself.
How platy24 does it
One person makes a tab and shares a six-character code. Everybody else opens the link and taps what they had — no account, no download, no signup. platy24 works out each person's share, spreads the service charge proportionally, and produces the shortest list of payments that settles the whole thing.
You can also photograph the receipt and have the line items read off it, or type them in plain language. Everything the AI produces is a draft you check before it is saved.