SquareUsUp

Frequently Asked Questions

We know you may still have a lot of questions. Presented here is a list of the most common questions we’ve gotten about using a SquareUsUp project, along with our detailed answers.

How can I delete sheets or change their order?

While you can create new sheets via SquareUsUp’s New Sheet button, other operations like rearranging and deleting sheets are not similarly provided via buttons. That’s because it’s easier to do these things with Excel’s built-in functionality than by anything SquareUsUp could devise.

To delete a sheet, just right-click on the sheet’s tab, then select Delete. Keep in mind that if any sheet has links to the deleted sheet’s ending balances, that will cause errors that will require you to reset the sheet’s starting balances, which can be done via the Adjust Balances button.

To rearrange the order of the sheets, just drag a sheet’s tab to whatever new position you want it to have among the other tabs. This will not affect any sheet linked to the sheet you move, but it may be confusing when a sheet’s starting balances are linked to the ending balances of a sheet that no longer immediately precedes it.

Be aware that if you’ve rearranged sheets, subsequent linking of starting balances to the previous sheet may potentially create “circular reference” problems, where two sheets’ starting balances end up referring to each other, which is an illegal condition. Excel will display arrows to indicate the error. Just reset starting balances on affected sheets to correct the problem.

While sheets may be renamed via the Change Titles button, you may also change a sheet name by double-clicking the name on the sheet’s tab to type a new name. Using the Change Titles button will change both the sheet name and the spreadsheet titles, while changing the name on the sheet’s tab will not change spreadsheet titles to match (which is perfectly fine). Whichever method you use to change a sheet name, any links to the renamed sheet will automatically be changed to refer to the sheet’s new name.

Can my SquareUsUp project contain non-SquareUsUp sheets?

If you maintain non-SquareUsUp Excel spreadsheets for your project, you can add those sheets to your SquareUsUp file in order to consolidate all your project’s spreadsheets into a single file. To copy an existing spreadsheet into a SquareUsUp file, right-click the tab of the sheet to copy, then select Excel’s Move or Copy option and specify your open SquareUsUp file. (A SquareUsUp sheet shouldn’t be copied to a non-SquareUsUp file since a SquareUsUp sheet needs macros and hidden sheets in the SquareUsUp file.)

For example, if you have a travel group, you may be keeping spreadsheets to track the trip’s itinerary or to list food and supplies group members are responsible for bringing. Rather than storing each spreadsheet in a separate file, you can include these sheets in your SquareUsUp project file to keep all trip-related spreadsheets together in one place.

How many transactions can a sheet hold?

The design of a SquareUsUp sheet requires a limitation to be made on the number of transactions that can be entered on a single sheet. The limit that was chosen is 900 transactions. The first transaction on each sheet is on row 8 (leaving room for buttons and headings above the first transaction), and transactions cannot be entered beyond row 907 (with the Summary info section shown beneath that row).

The difficulty in navigating hundreds of rows of transactions makes it preferable to split long lists of transactions onto multiple separate sheets, as discussed previously. This means you should rarely if ever find the 900-row limitation to present a problem.

Note that using the Move Rows option to reorder rows in the list requires the creation of temporary transaction rows. The consequence is that you cannot move a group of rows if the number of rows being moved plus the number of currently displayed rows exceeds 900.

How many users can a project have?

SquareUsUp sheets, user interface forms, and reports all require that a limitation be made on the number of users whose expenses can be tracked. The limit that was chosen is 15 users.

The more users that are allowed, the more design challenges that have to be overcome. 15 users was chosen as a limit that should serve the needs of the vast majority of SquareUsUp customers while keeping screens and reports to relatively compact and usable sizes.

Why are there so many hidden rows and columns?

SquareUsUp spreadsheets use hidden rows and columns to make the sheets easier to read and to use. Hiding of rows and columns is controlled by SquareUsUp through its buttons to assure proper operation of the spreadsheet. You shouldn’t use Excel’s Hide and Unhide operations yourself, as it’s much harder to do this than simply using SquareUsUp’s built-in capabilities, and you could easily make mistakes.

For example, when you add or delete users, columns in the Transactions, Balances, Charges, and Payments sections are hidden or unhidden so unused columns are not shown. Unused Transaction section rows are also hidden to allow the Summary section to appear directly underneath the filled-in transactions. The Grid Entry and Form Entry buttons create (unhide) a single empty row to contain the next transaction if no empty row is currently displayed. The Insert Rows button unhides the specified number of rows (and may move existing cell contents down), while the Delete Rows button hides the specified number of rows (and may erase cell contents and/or move existing cell contents up). Any attempt to manually hide and unhide transaction rows to simulate these operations may result in improper operation of the SquareUsUp sheet.

Columns to the right of the grid are hidden and protected to prevent you from trying to use the area of the sheet that houses its inner workings. While you are not prevented from unhiding these columns, the cells remain invisible and protected from modification, so there is really no reason to clutter the screen by unhiding this area.

Can I get the unprotect password to let me view and change code, formulas, and hidden cell contents?

Sorry, no. We know that many spreadsheets are published to demonstrate Excel techniques and to allow users to provide their own customizations. But SquareUsUp was not designed to be a teaching tool; it was written to be a polished app. This philosophy both protects the author’s rights to his work and helps prevent the propagation of mutant variations pretending to be genuine SquareUsUp spreadsheets.

Can I use a SquareUsUp spreadsheet without a mouse?

Even if a keyboard is your only interface to your device, SquareUsUp spreadsheets maintain their full functionality. Buttons on all forms may be “clicked” by tabbing to the button and then tapping the Enter key. Checkboxes and radio buttons may be turned off and on via the space bar when they are highlighted. And the buttons at the top of each sheet may be “clicked” by holding down the Shift and Ctrl keys and then tapping the first letter of the button’s text.

How does SquareUsUp deal with roundoff issues?

Unlike many expense-sharing templates and apps, SquareUsUp’s displayed balances will always total to exactly zero, even when normal methods of rounding values off to the nearest penny may cause discrepancies of a few pennies in balance totals. Importantly, SquareUsUp maintains full internal accuracy for all balances to prevent roundoff discrepancies from accumulating over time. This means that calculated balances will always represent the fairest possible way to distribute funds when debts are being squared up.

Payment amounts and starting balances may be entered with more than two decimal places, i.e., in fractions of a penny, both when typing directly into the spreadsheet and when using the Form Entry and Adjust Balances forms. Even though monetary amounts are always displayed with just two decimal places on SquareUsUp spreadsheets, forms, and reports, they are stored with full precision.

Only when starting balances are brought over from the previous sheet does SquareUsUp store a value that is rounded to an exact number of cents. When starting balances contain undisplayed fractions of cents, subsequent starting balance edits can cause those balances to be changed unintentionally, which may in turn cause transaction rows to fail to total to zero. Using rounded starting balances avoids this kind of annoying problem..

What are the best strategies for squaring up group debts?

When SquareUsUp is used for a defined timespan or for a specific event, e.g., to record shared expenses on a trip or for one season of a sports league, the group will probably want to square up everyone’s debts at the end of event. The SquareUsUp Report can suggest ways to do this.

When SquareUsUp is used on an ongoing basis without a defined end date, e.g., for roommates or a group that meets weekly, there may be little motivation to ever get everyone squared up since balances will not remain at zero for long anyway. Here, the goal will usually be simply to make sure no one strays too far from a balance of zero. This is accomplished by group members (presumably those who owe money) making occasional internal payments (presumably to those who are owed money). Keeping everyone’s balances reasonably close to zero, without worrying about getting everyone to exactly zero, is often the most practical way to use SquareUsUp for long-term activities.

What if multiple people pay a shared expense?

SquareUsUp requires a shared payment to have only one payer. This restriction greatly simplifies system use and spreadsheet clarity, and it imposes no significant limitations because a multiple-payer scenario is still easily handled.

When more than one person contributes to the payment of an expense (for instance, if a payment is split among multiple credit cards), it is recorded as two transactions: an internal payment in which each co-payer pays their contribution to the designated payer, and a shared payment in which the designated payer pays the full expense, recording each person’s share of responsibility for the payment as usual.

This way of recording a multiple-payer shared expense shows both what each person actually paid and each person’s share of responsibility for the payment – all without creating some sort of special Payments section syntax that would complicate transaction recording. And this method works even when the people contributing to the payment do not contribute exactly what they actually owed.

How do you split a purchase that wasn’t actually paid for?

What if a group member wants to charge one or more group members for something, even though that charge doesn’t correspond to an actual payment having been made? For example, if a group member buys lunch for one or more others using a gift card, or if a group member performs a service in exchange for payment by other group members.

This kind of transaction is treated as if the person asking for money from others did actually make a payment. In this case, the payment represents the value of what the payer gave to the group rather than the amount of money that left the payer’s wallet.

So, if a group’s lunches were paid from a gift card, the gift card owner is recorded as having paid the value of the meals purchased, while the recipients of the lunches are charged their appropriate shares of that amount. If a group member performs a service on behalf of the group and wants to be compensated, that person is recorded as “paying” the value of the service, and other group members are charged their shares of that amount.

How do you record a group member buying something for another group member?

When one group member buys something to give to another, one of two ways can be used to record the transaction. It could be treated as a shared payment, with the recipient of the purchased item assuming a 100% share of the payment. Alternatively, it could be treated as an internal payment, where the recipient of the purchased item is recorded as the recipient of the buyer’s payment – the payment in this case being the value of the purchased item.

Either approach will result in the exact same user balances. The difference will only be seen in the recipient’s summary totals. The shared payment will show the recipient’s balance decreasing because total charges increase by the cost of the item; the internal payment will show the recipient’s balance decreasing because the received total increases by the cost of the item.

Which method you use to record this transaction really depends on whether the purchased item is considered to be an expense that relates to the whole group. In other words, if the recipient of the item would have recorded the purchase in SquareUsUp if he/she had made the purchase for him/herself, the transaction should probably be recorded as a shared payment; if not, using an internal payment makes more sense.

What if a non-group member participates in a transaction?

There may occasionally be a transaction that involves one or more people who are not defined group members on the SquareUsUp sheet. One way to deal with this situation is simply to add each new person as a project group member.

If a new person involved in a shared payment is not expected to participate much in future transactions and therefore doesn’t rate becoming a permanent group member, the group can simply square up with that person outside the visibility of the SquareUsUp project, then handle any remaining parts of the transaction on the SquareUsUp sheet as usual. For example, if a person is a one-time substitute in a tennis group, that person can simply pay his or her share of the expense to the person who paid the tennis fees, then the SquareUsUp transaction would record only the remaining part of the full payment.

Why doesn’t SquareUsUp say what each person owes to each other person?

Some expense-sharing apps track debts on a person-by-person basis, where members’ financial statuses are defined by a matrix of what each person owes or is owed by each other person in the group. This approach needlessly complicates what should be a simple statement of each member’s balance within the group, and it significantly and unnecessarily increases the number of monetary transactions required to square everyone up.

SquareUsUp does not track who owes what to whom. When squaring up debts within a group, the goal is simply to get all group members back to even. No one should care where their debt payments go to or come from in their quest to owe nothing and be owed nothing.

People often have trouble accepting this concept. They may insist, for example, that they must directly pay back a group member who covered an expense for them. But other group transactions may render this debt repayment unnecessary. SquareUsUp handles all these details for the group, so no one has to keep track of their individual personal debts and everyone can be assured that the debt repayment process is kept as simple as possible.

How do we use SquareUsUp when we use a pot to pay expenses?

Some groups maintain a pot of money which group members contribute to and from which group expenses are paid. SquareUsUp can easily handle this situation.

From SquareUsUp’s viewpoint, a pot is simply another group member (albeit one who never shares an expense), so “Pot” should be added as a user. Whenever anyone puts money into the pot, that is recorded as an internal payment in which the person paying the pot is the payer and the pot is the recipient. Each pot payment increases the pot’s negative balance.

When an expense is paid from the pot, that is recorded as a shared payment in which the pot is the payer and other group members share 100% of the responsibility for that payment. Since Form Entry shows what each group member will be charged in a shared payment, this data entry method can help assure you the pot is being charged nothing when the expense is paid. And, as discussed in the Entering Transactions section, specifying fractional shares in Form Entry makes it easy to split a pot-paid expense equally among some or all group members.

The pot will always have a negative or zero balance that indicates how much money it contains. (The pot can never be owed money; it can only owe the money that’s been put into it.) When squaring everyone up, the pot’s funds will be figured in with everyone else’s balances to get everyone (including the pot) squared up.

How can we share access to the SquareUsUp spreadsheet?

Since SquareUsUp spreadsheets track the shared expenses of a group of people, the whole group will likely want to have access to that information. There are several ways to accomplish that goal.

If the spreadsheet is being stored on the personal device of the person who is maintaining it, that person can periodically produce SquareUsUp reports saved as .PDF files and send those to the group.

If the SquareUsUp file is being stored on a network or in a cloud location accessible to group members, it can be maintained and/or viewed by group members at any time.

If Excel is used in co-authoring mode, the SquareUsUp file can be accessed and even edited simultaneously by group members.

Can I use SquareUsUp if I don’t use Excel or Windows?

SquareUsUp was designed specifically as a Windows/Excel-based spreadsheet that will work on all supported versions of both Windows and Excel. Although it would be great to assure it works on other operating systems or with other spreadsheet tools, this would have been a colossal effort outside the scope of the developer’s requirements.

When running a SquareUsUp spreadsheet on Microsoft Excel in a non-Windows environment (e.g., on an Apple computer), the spreadsheet should still work well, as should most of the buttons. But some buttons (e.g., those for printing reports and saving your work) may not work as designed.

When running a SquareUsUp spreadsheet on an app other than genuine Microsoft Excel, the spreadsheet software will probably do a reasonable job of replicating an Excel experience, with some possible differences in screen appearance and behavior. But because non-Microsoft spreadsheets may not fully support the VBA programming language, a SquareUsUp sheet’s buttons may not function properly – or at all.

Without the buttons, sheet changes (titles, user names, starting balances, and transactions) can still be made directly on the sheet. You would not be able to run reports, and while other button functionality could be performed manually, it would probably be more trouble than it’s worth. Display of optional sections (Balances, Charges, and Payments) would require the manual hiding and unhiding of columns. Inserting, deleting, and moving rows could also be performed by laboriously hiding and unhiding rows and by copying and pasting transaction cells, while adding and deleting users could be done by hiding and unhiding columns. A new sheet could be added by copying an existing sheet, pasting it as a new sheet, and then editing the new sheet. But all this manual work would significantly detract from SquareUsUp’s ease of use – to the point you probably wouldn’t want to use it at all.

Bottom line: For an optimal SquareUsUp experience, use genuine Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Excel.

How does SquareUsUp compare to other expense-sharing apps?

Your group may require an elaborate app that’s designed for use on cell phone screens, does currency conversions, provides messaging services between group members, connects to banking institutions to facilitate payments between group members, and maybe even scans receipts for transaction entry. If features like these are important to your group, you’ll probably want to use something other than SquareUsUp.

On the other hand, SquareUsUp offers a method for tracking shared group expenses that lacks the complexity all those bells and whistles bring with them. Not to mention that it’s totally free.

How does SquareUsUp compare to other expense-sharing spreadsheets?

Countless expense-sharing spreadsheets have been published on the internet. Group expense-sharing spreadsheets tend to be rather barebones and written primarily to demonstrate a technique for implementing a solution rather than to create a polished app with a clean user interface and a comprehensive set of features.

While SquareUsUp is not a tool for teaching spreadsheet usage techniques, it is a full-featured, extensively documented expense-sharing solution. It provides user-friendly data entry, editing, viewing, and reporting mechanisms, it is robust in its ability to detect and respond in a friendly way to invalid inputs, it is scalable to just about any size project, and it insulates and protects the user from the complexities of the Excel environment. We are unaware of any other spreadsheet-based solution that comes close to SquareUsUp’s capabilities.

Why would anyone choose a spreadsheet besides SquareUsUp for group expense sharing?

Hmmm. You’ve finally stumped us.