[ejp]

In my experience, gnucash qualified easily as painful. :)

Here's an example of what I'm talking about: suppose you and a housemate decide that an equitable split for the electric bill is 65/35 based on usage habits. One person pays the electric bill every month. All of these finance apps will download the transaction, categorize the electric bill for me, and maybe apply a custom tag. But I have to manually calculate the amount owed to me, and manually reconcile that with the fact that the other person pays the water bill.

I'd love to find an accounting app for shared arrangements, but it seems like most are targeted to solo or completely joint finances. Monarch listed elsewhere in these comments is the closest I've seen, but it also doesn't support reconciling split transactions.

[aaronax]

I see. I split my monthly cell phone bill among 8 family members. This is a manual process, but not too bad since I do it on average twice a year (faster to sign in and download 6 PDFs once than to sign in 6 times to download 1 PDF each time, etc.). So a few minutes to download 6 statement PDFs, 10 minutes to key numbers from those PDFs into my spreadsheet, and then 15 minutes to go through and manually split the transactions based on totals from the spreadsheet.

I'm pretty sure I could write a custom importer for Beancount but the breakeven point on time would be years.

I think modifying the CSV importer for Beancount to split certain transactions to certain percentages would be fairly easy--switching to Beancount itself (or other Plain Text Accounting software) would of course be monumental. But it is the ultimate in flexibility.

[ska]

Part of what you found painful about gnucash is probably that it handles cases like this properly. Not saying it (gnucash) is perfect - far from - but a certain amount of effort is I think a side effect of having both proper accounting practice and configurable account types. Not sure you'll find something really easy that also does it well. In your case different peoples expense accounts would keep a rolling tally and help you figure out what the end of month transaction should be to even things out.

But any tech may be overkill. In a e.g. roommate situation, a paper record per month (plus receipts, if lower trust) works fine.