Split roommate bills without making everyone install an app
What's the simplest way to split bills among roommates?
Pick one roommate to be the household treasurer. Bills come out of their account, they log each one in Conto, and the other roommates send them their share each month. One person handles the money, everyone else just pays in.
What is Conto?
Conto is a treasurer-led expense tracker built for groups where one person already handles the money. For roommates, that's usually whoever's name is on the lease or whose card the utilities autopay on. Conto logs every shared bill, divides it by the headcount, and tells each roommate exactly what they owe.
Why the treasurer model fits roommate situations
In most shared-housing setups, one roommate's card is already on the electric bill, the internet auto-pays from one bank account, and one person is buying the household toilet paper from Costco. The money is already flowing through one person — Conto just makes the resulting splits explicit and trivially settle-able.
If you've tried tools like Splitwise for roommate bills, you've probably hit the friction: every roommate needs an account, has to log their own contributions, and the settlement graph gets weirder as months pile up. The treasurer model collapses all of that to: this is what you owe, send it.
What to log
Recurring monthly bills, plus one-off shared purchases. A typical month:
• Rent (if not paid individually) • Electricity, gas, water • Internet • Streaming subscriptions (if shared) • Costco / household supplies runs • Cleaning service • Shared groceries (if you actually cook together)
Skip anything that's not actually shared. Conto isn't trying to track every coffee — just the bills the group agreed to split.
Monthly settlement
At the end of each month, Conto totals the shared bills and divides by the headcount. Each non-treasurer roommate sees one number: send X to the treasurer this month. Same Venmo handle, same routine, predictable amount.
When the group changes — someone moves out mid-month, a sublet starts — adjust the participants on the affected expenses. Conto prorates by who participated, not by calendar days.
This is the same workflow you'd use for a group trip where one person does all the booking, just on a monthly cadence instead of a one-time trip.
When to look elsewhere
If your household genuinely has no central money handler — every roommate pays a different bill out of their own account, with no overlap — a peer-to-peer tracker like Splid fits better. The treasurer pattern is a strict simplification: it works because one person is already the hub. If that's not your situation, force-fitting it makes things harder, not easier.
It's also worth being honest about scale. The treasurer model is fine for two to five roommates and gets clunky past that. Once you're in a ten-person co-living house with rotating leases and three bills per utility, the bookkeeping load on one person stops being trivial. Conto is built for the common case — a normal apartment with normal roommates and normal bills — and is a deliberately bad fit for spreadsheet-tier complexity.
Frequently asked
- What if a roommate doesn't pay their share?
- Conto tracks unsettled balances. The treasurer can see at a glance who's behind and by how much — useful for the awkward conversation, or for documenting what's owed if it comes up at lease renewal.
- Can I split bills unevenly (e.g. by room size)?
- Yes. Per-expense weight overrides let you assign custom shares per roommate when 50/50 doesn't make sense.
- Does the treasurer need to take on tax or legal responsibility?
- No. Conto is just a ledger. Money flows through whoever's already paying the bills; the app just records and divides.
- Can I export a year's worth of bills for taxes?
- Yes. Each group exports to CSV with full expense history and per-roommate totals.