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How to export Splitwise data and move your group without losing history

October 7, 2026 · 13 min read · Dimesum Engineering

Your Splitwise history leaves as one spreadsheet per group, and an AI assistant can add every row to Dimesum with its real date, payer and split. The harder part is the group, so here is how to get four to ten people to move on the same weekend.

Your Splitwise history leaves as a spreadsheet, one group at a time. Export each group, open Dimesum, and hand the file to an AI assistant that adds every bill with its real date, payer and split. Nothing is retyped, and the old group stays where it is until the new balances match.

The hard part is rarely the file. It's getting four to ten people to agree to move on the same weekend. This guide covers both: the export, as far as Splitwise's own help pages describe it on 7 October 2026, the import, and the conversation with the friend who would rather nothing changed.

Quick answer. In Splitwise, open each group, find Export in the group's menu, and save the spreadsheet.

In Dimesum, create the group and add everyone, as a member or as a kept place. Then make a read and write key in the app's Developer screen, give an AI assistant the key, the file and the prompt from that screen, check its dry run, and let it add the rows. Payments are listed for you to record yourself.

What you need before you start

Gather these first, so the move happens in one sitting instead of three. None of them costs anything on the Dimesum side, and the ledger has no daily limit on how many bills go in.

• A Splitwise login that can see every group you want to move.
• A computer, if you can. Splitwise describes the export on both web and mobile, but a spreadsheet is easier to check on a big screen.
• A Dimesum account. The web app runs at app.dimesum.com; the Android and iOS apps are in closed testing.
• An AI assistant that can either connect to Dimesum over MCP or write and run a short script. Claude Desktop does the first; any assistant with a terminal does the second.
• Half an hour, and one person in the group willing to do it for everyone.

If you are still deciding whether to leave at all, our Splitwise alternatives list ranks the options, and the Dimesum and Splitwise comparison puts the two side by side. This page assumes the decision is made.

Step one: export each group from Splitwise

Splitwise exports one friendship or one group per file. Its help page, How do I export my Splitwise data?, gives the first three steps of each list below as of 7 October 2026; the fourth is ours.

On the web app at splitwise.com:

1. Open the group's page.
2. Click the settings icon.
3. Click "Export as spreadsheet".
4. Save the file with the group's name in it, for example lisbon-tokyo-trip.csv.

On the mobile app:

1. Open the group's page.
2. Scroll right along the horizontal menu at the top of that screen.
3. Tap "Export", the last option in that menu.
4. Send the file to the computer you will use for the import.

Repeat for every group that still matters. A flat that has run for three years is one file; a trip from last spring is another. Groups that are settled and finished can stay in Splitwise as an archive, and you can export them later if anyone asks.

What the help page does not say

The same page marks one option as Pro only: a JSON backup of the whole account, from "Your account", then "Advanced features", on the web. It does not attach a plan to the spreadsheet export. If the Export option is missing on your account, check your plan before assuming anything, or use the page's other route: it says a full account export is available by writing to Splitwise's support address.

What the spreadsheet actually holds

Splitwise's file has a column for the date, the description, the category, the cost and the currency, then one column per person. The help page explains the person columns: each number is the effect of that row on that person's balance. Paying for a bill or making a payment is positive. Borrowing is negative.

Take a trip with Emma, Lucas and Sofia. Emma paid €90 for dinner in Lisbon, split equally, and her own share was €30.

So her column reads +60. Lucas and Sofia each read −30. The three numbers add up to zero, which is how you know the row is whole.

Later Lucas sent Emma €30. That row is a payment, not a bill. Lucas's column reads +30, because he paid, and Emma's reads −30, because she received. Splitwise's page on how to double check your balances states this sign rule for payments, which matters in a moment.

The edge case: one column, two currencies

Then the trip moved to Tokyo. Lucas paid ¥9,000 for a hotel night, split three ways. His share was ¥3,000, so his column reads +6,000, and Emma and Sofia each read −3,000. Each row is in its own currency, named in the Currency column.

This is where the obvious shortcut breaks. Add up Emma's column and you get 60 − 30 − 3,000, which is −2,970 of nothing at all: euros and yen mixed into one number.

A person's column only sums correctly inside one currency. Emma is owed €30 and owes ¥3,000, and those are two balances, which is how Dimesum keeps them. We wrote about the bugs that come from folding currencies together and why shared balances never add up when that happens.

Why there is no one-click Splitwise importer

People ask why we don't connect to Splitwise and pull the history across. The answer is in Splitwise's API terms of use. They say the API "is not intended for commercial use", and that you may not use Splitwise's materials "to create an application that replicates existing Splitwise functionality or competes with Splitwise and our Services."

So Dimesum never touches Splitwise's API. The route that remains is the one in this guide: you export your own data with Splitwise's own button, and you decide what to do with the file. The assistant reads a spreadsheet on your computer. It never logs in to Splitwise.

Step two: set up the group in Dimesum

Do this before the import, so every row has somebody to land on. It takes a few minutes per group.

1. Open Dimesum in a browser and sign in with your email.
2. Create a group with the same name as the Splitwise group, so the assistant can match it.
3. Add the people who already have a Dimesum account as members.
4. Add everyone else as a kept place: a named seat for a person who has no account yet. Their balance builds up on that seat.
5. Share the group's invite link or QR code in your group chat. A person who opens it claims their kept place, balance and all.

Kept places are what make a move possible without everyone signing up on the same day. Emma can move the whole Lisbon to Tokyo trip on Sunday; Lucas claims his seat on Tuesday and finds his history waiting. We cover the wider version of this in splitting a bill with someone who doesn't have the app.

Step three: move the history in with an AI assistant

Dimesum's import lives in the app, under Me, then Profile, then Developer. The card at the top of that screen is called Import with AI, and it gives the whole method in three lines: make a read and write key, attach your spreadsheet, paste the prompt and check the dry run.

1. On the Developer screen, create an API key and turn on Allow changes. Copy the key when it appears; it is shown once.
2. Put the key where your assistant reads it. An MCP client such as Claude Desktop holds it in its own connection settings; a script reads it from an environment variable. Keep it out of the chat when you can.
3. Copy the prompt with the copy icon in the corner of the Import with AI card, and paste it into the assistant. Fill in the group name and the currency to use if a row has none.
4. Attach the Splitwise file and tell the assistant it came from Splitwise. Paste the paragraph from the section above on what the person columns mean, so it reads the signs correctly.
5. Read the dry run before you say yes. The assistant should show you the first 20 rows as it will send them, with the date, the amount, who paid and each person's share, plus the count of rows and the total per currency. If it skips this, ask for it.
6. Say yes. The assistant adds each bill with its original date. Rows that are payments between people are listed for you, not added as bills.
7. Record those payments yourself in the group, from the app, so each one is confirmed by a person.

Two details make this safe to run twice. Every write to Dimesum carries an idempotency key, and the import builds each row's key from its row number and date, so a re-run after an interruption replays the first write instead of adding a copy. And a split whose shares don't add up to the bill's amount is refused, so a rounding slip shows up as an error rather than as somebody's debt. That is the same rule behind our post on why an edit must restate its split.

A key allows two calls a second. A flat's year of groceries and bills is a few hundred rows, and 500 rows take about five minutes. The append-only ledger records each one as an entry with its history, so a mistake found next month is corrected on top, never erased.

Check the totals match before anyone deletes anything

When the import finishes, compare each person's balance in both apps, one currency at a time. Here is the Lisbon to Tokyo trip after the move. The euro balances differ by Lucas's €30 payment until someone records it, and then they agree.

Every column sums to zero, which is the first check. The second is that the after column matches Splitwise line for line.

Once it does, settling takes three transfers: Sofia sends Emma €30, and Emma and Sofia each send Lucas ¥3,000. Dimesum settles a group in at most one transfer fewer than its people, per currency, and the settle up guide shows the arithmetic. If a balance is off, the cause is almost always a payment row not yet recorded, or a row in the wrong currency.

The committee problem: getting the whole group to move

Switching an expense app is a group decision, and groups default to doing nothing. Four to ten people have to agree, at least one of them likes things as they are, and the history sits in the old app like furniture nobody wants to carry.

The complaint that starts a move is also short-lived. The free tier's cap bites in the middle of a trip, the trip ends, and the annoyance fades before anyone organises anything.

Splitwise's help centre puts the cap at 4 expenses a day for a free account, as of 7 October 2026. One review on Splitwise's App Store listing in Great Britain, collected in August 2026 on app version 26.6.3, shows what meeting it is like: "after your 4th expense it says 'daily limit reached'". Another, on version 26.5.4, says "EVERY member of a group needs a subscription". Our post on the Splitwise daily expense limit covers the cap and what Pro changes.

Five moves that get a group across

1. Pick the moment the problem is fresh. The day the limit stops someone adding a bill is the day the group will listen.
2. Offer to do all of it. One person exports, imports and checks; everyone else only opens a link.
3. Ask nobody to install anything. Dimesum runs in a browser, and a kept place holds each person's balance until they claim it.
4. Keep the old group untouched for a month. Nobody loses anything if the move goes wrong, and the export can be rerun.
5. Move at a clean break if you can: right after a settle up, or at the start of a new month's rent. A group that starts at zero only needs the history as a record, not as live balances.

The last option is worth taking seriously. If the group can settle in Splitwise first, keep the exported spreadsheets as the archive and start the Dimesum group empty. The import is for the groups that can't stop, like a flat mid lease, where the running balance has to carry over. Our guide to keeping track of shared expenses covers the everyday side once the group is in, and the shared expense tracker template is there for anyone who would rather keep the archive in a sheet.

What changes for the group after the move

The bills look the same. What changes is what happens around them. Dimesum has no daily limit on bills, and it keeps each currency's balance separate. An edit restates the whole split and keeps the old version in the history.

Groups can hold up to 50 members. When someone settles, Dimesum offers a door to the way the other person gets paid, such as PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, Wise or Revolut. It never holds or moves money. If a dinner needs splitting by what each person ordered, the apps that split a bill by item post walks through it.

If your group also uses Tricount, Splid or Settle Up for other trips, the same export and import method applies to any spreadsheet. See Tricount alternatives and Splid and Settle Up alternatives for how those apps describe their own plans. For a group that keeps its money inside one bank instead, our comparison of bank split features sets out where those features stop.