How BillSplitor works

Upload a photo of the printed receipt and it is passed through OCR and a language model that pulls out the line items, quantities, unit prices, the subtotal, the service charge and SST. Nothing is estimated from a rate: if a receipt shows 6% SST as RM4.20, the app works with RM4.20, because Malaysian receipts vary wildly in how they round and in which order they stack service charge and tax.

The scan is a starting point, not gospel. Faded thermal paper, handwritten additions, two-column layouts and dishes named in dialect all trip it up. That is why the first screen after scanning is an editable list — fix a description, correct a price, delete a duplicate line. Nothing is shared until you decide it looks right.

Splitting the food and then dividing the tax equally is the mistake that starts most arguments — the person who ordered a drink ends up subsidising the person who ordered steak. BillSplitor totals what each person claimed, then allocates the service charge and SST across those subtotals in proportion. Order a tenth of the food and you pay a tenth of the tax.

Two flags on each line handle the awkward cases. Mark an item shareable and its cost is divided evenly among everyone who claims it — the fish the whole table picked at. Mark it split equally and it is charged to every diner at the table regardless of who claims what, which is how rice, bottled water and the towel charge should behave. Items marked split-equally use the headcount you set, not the number of people who happened to tap.

Sharing produces a single link. Whoever opens it sees the item list, types a name, taps what they ate and submits. There is no download, no sign-up and no account for the people you send it to — the barrier that kills every other bill-splitting app is exactly the thing that has to be zero when you are sending a link into a WhatsApp group at 10pm.

If two people claim the last portion of something, the app tells them instead of silently double-charging. When everything has been claimed the bill closes itself, and the person who paid gets a breakdown of who owes what. If items are still unclaimed a day later, the app emails the payer one reminder card to forward to the group — one, not a stream of them.

The payer can attach a DuitNow QR image or a Touch 'n Go number to the bill. Everyone who claims then sees it on their own summary, so they can transfer immediately rather than asking for the number and forgetting. BillSplitor never touches money: it does not process payments, hold funds or verify that a transfer happened. It only shows the payer's own payment details to the people who owe them.

A weekend away breaks the one-receipt model — several bills, several people fronting money, sometimes another currency. Upgrade mode groups any number of bills into one set behind a single link. Each bill keeps its own tax rules and its own currency with an exchange rate you set, because a Bangkok receipt should never be taxed by Malaysian rules.

Once everyone has claimed across all the bills, the settlement engine nets the whole set down to the fewest transfers — instead of eleven people paying each other in a circle, it works out who pays whom, once. Partial repayments can be logged as they happen and they offset the plan.

It does not need an account to split a bill. It does not store your bank details or card numbers. It does not keep your data around: bills and their receipt photos are deleted automatically 30 days after they are created, on a daily sweep, along with the uploaded image. Signing in is optional and only buys you convenience — saved payment details, your past bills in one place, and reusable groups for a table you split with often.

Anyone holding a bill's link can see that bill's items and the names people entered, so treat the link the way you would treat the receipt itself. Bill links are never indexed by search engines.

BillSplitor is built and maintained by one developer in Malaysia. It is free, and it is paid for by the ads on the public pages plus the occasional teh tarik from the footer. There is no paid tier, no per-bill fee and no data being sold. If something is broken or missing, the feedback page goes straight to a human. Common questions are answered on the FAQ, and the guides work through the tax arithmetic, the WhatsApp loop and multi-bill trips in full.