This is a beta version. There might be problems I'm not aware of.

This is a tool that calculates not only the portions of a bill (typically a restaurant check) owed by several parties, but also calculates the proportional amount of tax and tip owed by each. This is potentially useful to people like me who manage in-home finances and maintain running tabs for roommates, especially if the parties owe sufficiently different amounts to result in non-trivial variations among tax and tip owed.

I expect this tool to be fairly self-evident and intuitive. Enter relative figures, and other figures will generally adjust automatically. If you enter a bill subtotal and tax or tip percentage, the total tax or tip will be calculated accordingly, or vice-versa. Checkboxes allow you to specify which items are shared by which parties. It is not necessary to name items and parties; this functionality is provided only for convenience.

This page is written and tested with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.x. Compatibility with other modern JavaScript-enabled browsers is assumed but not guaranteed.

Currently, the number of decimal places displayed is not limited in any figures that are used in other calculations. There is currently no persistent internal representation of the data. When calculations are performed, numbers are taken right out of the diplay. So if I rounded, accuracy would deteriorate with every number or option changed. I may implement an internal representation in a future version.

The page doesn't require you to enter the bill subtotal, but in order for the party-by-party tax and tip portions (and hence totals) to be correct, you must enter it.

The page is hard-coded for up to five parties and up to ten items. Allowing a custom number of each would have made the programming significantly more complicated. I might do it eventually.

Sorry the page is so huge. I might play with font sizes sometime, as they probably don't need to be quite that big.

(Mike Webb 2004-01-28)