one day i was in the shower, and my train of thought ended up at my days at berkeley and how we would split our bills. there were eight of us living in one apartment, and whenever any of us would buy something like groceries, or pay a utility bill, we would give the receipt to albert. at the end of the month, he would perform some wonderous magic spell and tell us all how much we owed each other.

so, in the shower, i got to thinking how it would be cool if he would put up all the billing information on some dinky website so that it was easily accessible and formatted neatly.

then, i thought it would be cool if there was a webapp that let him enter in bill amounts and would automatically figure out how much each person owed to the group.

then came this total epiphany moment where i decided to make this webapp available to the public. it would be such a useful tool for anyone living with other people and had to share bills… everyone was going to use it! i was really excited, beacuse somehow i was going to make billions of dollars with this. i even thought of an awesome name for it: grouptab.com.

so after about a month of post-work-hours programming, grouptab.com was ready for public consumption. on the hunt for somewhere to post advertisements, i came across roommates.com. i looked in their resources section, and to my shock and horror i see a link named buddybills.com. “oh dear god,” i thought, “please do not let this be what i think it is.” but no one heard my plea, and my dreams of being the first to monopolize the sharing-bills webapp market were dashed. buddybills was basically the exact same thing as grouptab (i did write my site completely ignorant of buddybills, however, and i think grouptab is better.)

since its inception, grouptab hasn’t enjoyed much success. i think it works really well, but no one seems interested in using it..

one thing to remember if you decide to use grouptab is to please read the tutorial. everyone seems to make one tab per bill, which is the completely wrong way to use the site. sigh.

grouptab.com was written in php, and uses a mysql database behind the scenes. it was my first attempt at a real account-based site w/ sessions and complicated dynamic table generation.

screenshots