SpecsyShopping lists
Split the shopping costs without keeping receipts
One person goes to the shop and the shopping is for everyone. Specsy records the price of every item bought, leaves personal purchases out of the shared count, and at the end shows who spent what and who owes whom — with nothing to work out by hand and no transfers that are not needed.
- Basket total
- 175.30 €
- Tom paid
- 120.00 €
- Lucilla paid
- 55.30 €
- Lucilla owes Tom
- 41.93 €
- Anna owes Tom
- 3.23 €
A receipt is the wrong tool for this
One person does the main shop, another picks up what was forgotten later, a third pays for part of the food for a party. A few days on it is already hard to remember who spent what.
Receipts can be kept, gathered up and gone through by hand. In practice it rarely gets that far.
And the difficulty is not only the arithmetic. Someone still has to be the first to bring money up.
So it is easier to record the spending straight away, at the moment the item goes into the basket.
What Specsy needs to work it out
Nothing has to be filled in after the shop. It is all recorded while you are buying.
- The price of an item — Specsy asks for it when you tick the item off as bought
- Who paid — by default whoever ticked the item off, and that can be changed
- The people on the list — the shared spending is divided between them
- A personal purchase — bought only for yourself, so it stays out of the shared count
- The currency of the list — euro, dollar, pound, rouble or hryvnia
How it works in the shop
- Turn price tracking onFrom then on Specsy asks for a price every time an item is ticked off as bought.
- Tick an item off as it goes into the basketThe price is recorded at that same moment, so nothing has to be worked out from a receipt later.
- Keep personal purchases separateIf something in the shared basket is only for you, mark it personal — its cost is not divided between the others.
- Look at the total after the shopSpecsy gathers the spending of everyone on the list and shows who spent what, who owes whom, and how to clear the balance in the fewest transfers.
One trip, two kinds of item
Shared items are divided between the people on the list. Personal ones stay with the person they were bought for.
| Item | Price | How it counts |
|---|---|---|
| Chicken wings | 12.40 € | Split between three |
| Still water, 2 l | 2.20 € | Split between three |
| Wine for Anna | 9.90 € | Counts only towards Anna |
| Charcoal | 6.50 € | Split between three |
A personal purchase does not add anything to what the others owe. So one basket can hold both the shared food and things meant for one person — Specsy counts them separately.
Who this helps most
- Flatmates — when the food is bought in turns and the cost is shared
- A couple — when one person goes to the shop and it is not always the same person paying
- A group away for the weekend — when everyone buys something and nobody wants to go through receipts afterwards
- Parties and picnics — when the food, the drink and everything else are bought by different people
- Shopping for family — when the shop is on you and that spending has to stay separate from your own
Questions people ask
Does Specsy move the money?
No. It works out the numbers and stops there. There is no payment inside the app and no button to mark a debt as repaid — you settle up however you normally do.
Do I have to enter a price for everything?
On a list with prices switched on, yes. An item is not marked bought until a price is entered. That is deliberate: a price entered later, from memory, is the reason these counts stop adding up.
What if two people paid in the same shop?
The payer is set per item, and can also be set for a whole shop at once. By default the payer is whoever ticked the item off.
Is it free?
Prices and the shared total are part of Pro. The list itself, sharing it and shop mode all work on the free plan.
Can the list be in a different currency?
One currency per list, from euro, dollar, pound, rouble and hryvnia. It is a label on the numbers — Specsy does not convert between currencies.
Where does it all go after the shop?
Send the list to the archive and everything is kept: who bought what, at what price, and the final settlement. Archives are stored for a month, so save the list as a template if you want to keep it longer.