How to track money friends owe you
Money lent to a friend is rarely forgotten by the lender and frequently forgotten by the borrower. That asymmetry — not the amount — is what damages the friendship.
Published
A loan is not a split
These get conflated and they behave completely differently. A shared cost gets divided — four people, one bill, four shares. A loan is not divided at all: one person handed money to another, and the whole amount comes back.
Using a group and inventing an expense to represent a loan makes the record harder to read and the balance harder to explain. A two-person ledger records what actually happened: money went one way, and later it comes back.
Why small amounts are worth recording
The instinct is that £20 is too small to write down. In practice, small loans are the ones that go wrong — precisely because they feel too minor to mention, so nobody mentions them and nobody repays them.
They are also not trivial to everyone. In the United States, 63% of adults said they could cover a hypothetical $400 emergency expense entirely with cash or its equivalent in 2025 — a figure unchanged since 2022, and one that means 37% could not.[1] A few hundred pounds lent and not returned is a real liquidity problem for a substantial share of people, not an accounting detail.
What to record
| Field | Example | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Direction | You gave / You got | Determines which way the balance moves. |
| Amount | £40 | The obvious part. |
| Date | 12 February | Anchors the entry, and quietly signals how long it has been. |
| A note | “Taxi home from Dave’s” | The difference between a record and a puzzle. '£40' means nothing in August. |
| A photo, if it is large | Transfer confirmation | Removes any doubt about whether it happened. |
The note is the field people skip and the one that does the work. An entry you cannot interpret six months later is not evidence of anything.
Keep it running, both directions
The mistake is keeping a list only of what they owe you. Friendships where money moves usually move it both ways, and a one-directional list is both inaccurate and faintly hostile.
A ledger that runs both ways
Two friends who regularly cover for each other. Every movement goes in the same ledger.
| Date | What | Direction | Amount | Balance after |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12 Feb | Lent cash for a taxi | You gave | £40 | They owe you £40 |
| 3 Mar | They bought your gig ticket | You got | £65 | You owe them £25 |
| 19 Mar | Covered their lunch | You gave | £18 | You owe them £7 |
| 2 Apr | Paid their share of a gift | You gave | £30 | They owe you £23 |
| 28 May | They transferred you | You got | £23 | Settled |
Result: Five entries and one transfer. Nobody had to remember four separate amounts, and at two points the balance was in the other person's favour — which is exactly why keeping only a list of debts owed to you produces the wrong answer.
How to ask for it back
The hard part is never the record. It is the sentence.
- Refer to the record, not the person. “I've got £23 outstanding from the gift — shall we sort it?” is a fact. “You still owe me” is a claim.
- Ask early. A week later is a reminder. Four months later is a confrontation, because the delay itself implies resentment.
- Give them a way to pay. Send the account details in the same message. Removing friction removes excuses.
- Net it off where you can. If they covered something for you, subtract it and ask for the difference. Smaller number, easier conversation.
- Decide your write-off threshold. Pick an amount below which you will simply let it go, and let it go properly rather than remembering it for two years.
Two things worth deciding before you lend
Whether you can afford not to get it back
The realistic question. If losing it would genuinely hurt, that is worth knowing before you hand it over, not afterwards.
When you expect it back
Saying “whenever” feels generous and creates the problem. “End of the month?” costs nothing to say at the time and makes the follow-up a reference to an agreement rather than a demand.
Doing this in Expenddy
Add the person as a friend and record entries as You gave or You got, with a note and a date. The ledger keeps the running balance in both directions and exports to CSV. No group needed, and nothing gets split — see the IOU tracker page.
Questions
Can Expenddy track IOUs between two people?
Expenddy has a one-to-one friend ledger for informal lending, which does not require creating a group. You record entries as 'You gave' or 'You got' against one person, and the ledger keeps a running balance showing whether that person owes you or you owe them. The ledger can be exported to CSV.
Can I record settlements when someone pays me back?
When a payment happens you record it in Expenddy as a settlement, and the balances clear by that amount. Expenddy keeps a dated settlement history of who paid whom. If a settlement was recorded by mistake it can be voided or edited, and the balance movement is reversed exactly — the original entry is annotated rather than deleted, so the history stays accurate.
Does Expenddy actually move the money?
Expenddy does not move, hold or transfer money, and it is not a bank or a payment service. You pay each other however you already do — cash, bank transfer, or any payment app — and then record in Expenddy that the payment happened. Expenddy is the record of who owes what, not the mechanism for paying it.
Sources
- Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households — dealing with unexpected expenses. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2025 survey year, page updated 13 May 2026 — 63% of adults said they would cover a hypothetical $400 emergency expense exclusively using cash or its equivalent, unchanged since 2022
External statistics above are published by the organisations named and are not Expenddy data. Statements about how Expenddy works describe the app itself.