Debts Solver

A simple utility written in PHP (8.1+) to minimize amount of transactions required to pay off debts between people.

What is the use case?

Assume that you have a Xlsx spreadsheet that contains a list of transactions made by a group of friends, in which there are (at least) three columns: Payer (string), Beneficiary (string) and Amount (float). On a meet that you were all present, a few of you paid bills for the others. If there were multiple payers and a lot of transactions, it may not be a trivial task to quickly summarize how much each beneficiary should pay to each payer.

What this utility do?

It does three things:

Minimizes amount of transactions required for beneficiaries to pay off their payers.
Resolves abstract payers/beneficiaries - useful for whip-rounds (instead of a person name you can use whip-round alias inside brackets, like [pizza] or [grill]).
Allows to proxy all transactions by a single person (see the --proxy-person option).

Usage

After installation of the Composer dependencies, this utility can be used as a standalone CLI script:

php bin/debts-solver.php Transactions.xlsx C D E --skip-rows=1 --proxy-person=xyz

Arguments C, D and E in the example above represent columns in the spreadsheet for: Payer, Beneficiary and Amount, respectively. For more detailed information about arguments and options, please refer to the help page by calling php bin/debts-solver.php --help from the CLI.

Data will be presented in form of a three-column table on the standard output.

You may also want to use this utility as a library, especially using classes from the Model and Operation directories. Refer to the Command/DebtSolverCommand.php file for usage details.

Technical notice

Rows with invalid data, zero amount or those having the same payer and beneficiary names, are being automatically skipped, since they are redundant. All names are normalized using Transliterate class (ext-intl), trimmed and made lower-case.

Author of this library does not give any guarantee that output results are correct. Use it only for your own responsibility.

License