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How to switch from Splitwise without losing your balances

You added three expenses after dinner and the app told you to come back tomorrow. Or the currency conversion you used last summer is now behind a subscription. Whatever pushed you, you are looking at another app - and at the number next to your friend's name, the one that says he still owes you $110 from the ski trip.

That number is the reason most people never actually switch. The app is easy to replace. The balance feels like it lives inside the app, and moving out feels like agreeing to forget it.

It does not live inside the app. It lives in a two-column subtraction that you can redo anywhere. Here is how to take both your history and your balances with you, in about twenty minutes, and how to prove afterwards that nothing got lost.

If you just need the arithmetic once and are not switching anything, our free balance calculator does it in the browser, no sign-up.

What happens to your balances when you leave Splitwise?

Nothing happens to them, because a balance is not stored value. It is the difference between what you paid into the group and what your share of the group's spending was. Delete the app tomorrow and that difference still exists - it just stops being displayed.

This matters for the move. You are not transferring money or migrating an account. You are copying two things into a new place: the list of expenses, if you want the history, and the final position of each person, which is what your friends actually care about.

Those two things move differently, and the second one is where every guide goes quiet.

Can you export your data on the free plan?

Yes, and this is where most switching guides quietly mislead you. The export is not a paid feature and it takes two clicks. Splitwise's own help pages describe the steps for both the phone app and the website, and neither description mentions a Pro requirement anywhere. Your data is not locked in - only the convenient, one-button move to a competitor is missing, which is a different problem.

On the phone: open the group or the friendship, scroll the horizontal menu in the header to the right, tap Export at the end of it.

In a browser: open the group from the left sidebar, click the gear icon in the top right, click Export Spreadsheet.

One detail decides how long this takes you: the export lives inside a group, not inside your account. Four groups means four files, downloaded one at a time. Do the phone one first if you are unsure - it is the same file.

What is actually inside the export file?

One row per expense, and one column per person. The row holds the date, the description, the category, the cost and the currency; the columns hold what that expense did to each member's position, positive for the person who paid, negative for the people who owe.

Open it before you do anything else. The file is the only thing you take with you, and it is worth thirty seconds to confirm it is not empty and covers the dates you expect.

The bottom line of those member columns is the number your friends know. Everything above it is the paperwork behind it.

What does not come with you?

The spreadsheet carries the arithmetic, not the context. Receipt photos are stored inside the service and are not in the file. Comments under expenses do not come. Neither does the record of who marked a debt as settled, or when - you only get the result of it.

None of that is fatal, but it is worth deciding before you delete the old group rather than after:

• Receipt photos - if any of them matter (a deposit, a big rental, anything you might need to prove), save them separately now.
• Comments - screenshot the two or three that carry a decision, like the one where you agreed how to split the villa.
• Categories - they rarely map one to one between apps. Expect to re-tag or to lose the tagging.
• The settled-up history - the new app will show today's position, not the trail that led to it.

Keep the CSV file itself somewhere boring and permanent - a folder in your cloud drive. It is your receipt for the move.

Should you settle up before you move, or carry the balance?

If everyone can pay right now, settle first and start the new app at zero. It is the cleanest possible migration: nothing to carry, nothing to reconcile, no chance of copying a number wrong. If money is still outstanding, and it usually is, carry the balance instead of pretending it does not exist.

The wrong move is the third one people take by default: install the new app, start adding expenses, and leave the old balance "for later". Two weeks later nobody remembers whether the $110 was already counted, and the argument you were avoiding shows up anyway.

How do you carry a balance into an app with no importer?

A handful of apps read the Splitwise file directly. Most do not, and that is fine - you do not need an importer to move a balance, you need one entry that reproduces it. The trick is to record the debt itself as if it were an expense the creditor paid for.

1. Write down the final positions from the old app: who is owed, who owes, exact amounts. The positives and the negatives must cancel out - if they do not, you copied something wrong.
2. Create the group in the new app with the same people.
3. Add one entry per creditor. Description: Carry-over from previous app. Payer: the person who is owed. Amount: the total that is owed to them.
4. Split that entry by exact amounts, not equally. Give each debtor exactly what they owe and give everyone else zero. Most apps call this mode "Amounts" or "Exact"; if yours has only shares, use shares proportional to the debts.
5. Do not touch it again. The entry is bookkeeping, not a purchase - editing it later is how balances drift.

One warning that no migration guide mentions: this entry counts as spending in whatever statistics the new app shows you. A $180 carry-over makes the trip look $180 more expensive than it was. Put the carry-over in its own group, or give it a category you can filter out later.

The full example, from old app to new

Here is the whole method on one group, with numbers you can follow to the end. Three friends, one ski weekend, one unpaid balance. Anna fronted the chalet, Ben bought the lift passes, Chris paid for almost nothing and knows it. The old app shows Anna at plus $180, Ben at minus $110 and Chris at minus $70, and nobody has any intention of settling before the next trip.

First check: the positives equal the negatives. $180 owed to Anna, $110 + $70 = $180 owed by the other two. The books are balanced, so the numbers are safe to copy.

In the new app, Anna creates the group and adds one entry:

The new app now shows exactly what the old one did. Anna is owed $180, Ben owes $110, Chris owes $70. Nothing was invented and nothing was rounded.

Now the version people actually have: two creditors. Say Dana was on the trip too, and the positions are Anna +$180, Dana +$40, Ben -$150, Chris -$70. Two entries, one per creditor:

Ben ends at -$150, Chris at -$30 - $40 = -$70, Anna at +$180, Dana at +$40. Same positions as before the move, reached with two entries instead of a spreadsheet.

How do you check the move actually added up?

Run two sums, in this order, before anyone touches the new group. If both pass, the migration is arithmetically correct, and you can say so to the group with a straight face instead of asking four people to trust that you typed carefully. If either fails, you know within a minute which entry is wrong.

Check one - the balance sums to zero. Add up every position in the new app, positives and negatives together. The total must be exactly zero. Any other number means an entry is missing a person or an amount was typed wrong.

Check two - each person matches their old number. Compare person by person against the old app, to the cent. This catches the error the first check cannot: two mistakes that cancel each other out.

Do both before anyone adds a new expense. After the first fresh expense lands, the numbers move, and telling a migration error apart from normal trip spending gets much harder. Splitwise's own help pages suggest a similar habit for a different reason - if a balance looks wrong, check the recent activity and the printable summary before assuming the math is broken.

What about several groups and several currencies?

Export is per group, so a person with a ski group, a flatmate group and a Croatia group downloads three files and repeats the carry-over three times. Tedious, not complicated - and worth doing one group per sitting rather than all at once, because the checks in the previous section are what keep it honest.

Currencies need one decision made out loud. The file records the currency each expense was paid in, but not the rate you had in your head when you agreed who owed what. If your balances were displayed in euros and your new app works in dollars, do not convert the individual expenses - convert the final balance once, at a rate everyone can see, and write that rate into the carry-over description: Carry-over from previous app, EUR 165 at 1.09.

That single line removes the entire class of argument that starts with "but I thought we agreed on a different rate".

Which apps can import a Splitwise file?

Some apps read the CSV and rebuild the group for you; most do not, and the carry-over method covers the rest. As of August 2026, the ones publicly advertising a Splitwise import are Are We Even, SplitMyExpenses and Split The Bill - each reads the exported file, maps the members, and recalculates positions from there.

We build Travel P&L, so treat this as disclosure rather than a review: it belongs in the second row - no importer, and the carry-over is how a balance comes in. If keeping the full expense history matters more to you than anything else, an app with an importer is the better fit, and that is a fine reason to pick one.

What to agree with the group before you switch

Send six lines in the group chat before anyone installs anything. Migrations go wrong socially far more often than technically: one person moves, two people keep adding expenses to the old app, and for a week the group is keeping two sets of books that disagree. Answering these six questions in public takes two minutes and prevents the whole mess.

1. The date the old app stops being the source of truth.
2. The final balances as of that date, pasted as text so everyone can see them.
3. Who creates the new group and adds the carry-over entries.
4. Which currency the new group runs in, and the rate used if it changed.
5. Where the exported files are stored, in case anyone wants the old detail.
6. A reminder that nobody adds expenses to the old app after the cut-off date.

Once those six are answered, the move takes about twenty minutes and produces the same numbers you started with - which is the entire point.

Moving because a trip is coming up, not because of the subscription? Two other pieces are worth reading first: how to split accommodation costs when nights and rooms differ, and what to send when someone still has not paid you back.

Sources

• Splitwise help center: how to double check your balances - export steps for the app and the website, what a row in the export means, and the advice to review recent activity when a balance looks wrong.
• Splitwise Pro - the official list of what sits behind the paid tier, including unlimited expenses, currency conversion and receipt scanning.
• Are We Even: moving expense history from Splitwise - a migration guide from a competing app; useful for its point that current balances matter more than full history.
• SplitMyExpenses: importing Splitwise data - describes member mapping and the choice between importing expenses or balances.
• Split The Bill: Splitwise CSV migration - describes the per-currency preview shown before an import is committed.