Flatmates & bedspace

Four names on the group chat. One person paying everything.

Somebody fronts the rent cheque. Somebody else pays DEWA. The groceries are whoever went to Lulu last. NetWorth+ keeps the running score, and the money you are owed shows up in your own net worth instead of a separate app you both forget to open.

Android, freeNo bank loginReads bank alerts on your phone

A month in a shared flat

What the ledger holds

  • Rent cheque, AED 42,000Paid by one person, split four ways, twelve months
  • DEWA + internetRecurring, same split, no re-entry
  • Grocery runsWhoever paid, split by who eats
  • Your positionAED 3,150 owed to you — counted as an asset

In short

NetWorth+ is a free Android app for tracking money between flatmates. You log the rent cheque, the utility bill and the grocery run once; it works out each person's share, keeps a running balance, and — unlike a dedicated bill-splitting app — folds what you are owed into your own net worth figure as an asset. It never asks for a bank login. In the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman it can read your bank's alert SMS on the phone, with your permission, so the amounts fill themselves in. Message text is processed on the device and is not uploaded.

Platform

Android 8.0+

Cost

Free, no ads

Bank login

Never required

Group size

No cap on flatmates

The problem

Shared flats do not owe money evenly, they owe it in lumps

A splitting app built for holiday trips assumes everybody pays a bit, all the time. A shared flat in Dubai or Riyadh does not work like that.

Rent lands as one or two or four cheques a year, usually from whoever has the strongest bank position — and that person then carries five figures of everyone else's money for months. Utilities arrive monthly in one name. The internet contract is in a third name because that person had the Emirates ID appointment first. Groceries are chaotic. The cleaner is cash.

By month three, nobody can reconstruct it. The group chat has become the ledger, and the group chat is a terrible ledger.

What you actually need to see

  • Whether the person who wrote the rent cheque is still ahead, and by how much
  • Which bills recur on the same split every month, so they are entered once
  • What happens to the running balance when someone moves out mid-cheque
  • Whether the money you are owed is real enough to count as part of your savings

How it handles it

Four things a group chat cannot do

Splits that are not equal

The person in the master bedroom pays more than the person in the partition. Set the share once, by percentage or by fixed amount, and it holds for every future entry on that expense.

Recurring bills entered once

DEWA, du, the cleaner, the water delivery. Set it up as a scheduled payment on the split you agreed and it posts itself each cycle instead of being argued about each cycle.

The balance counts as money

AED 3,150 owed to you by three flatmates is an asset. NetWorth+ carries it into your net worth, so your total reflects money that exists but has not come back yet.

Sharing without exposure

Share the shared-expense view with your flatmates and nothing else. Your salary, your savings goal and your own accounts stay private. Access is read-only and you can withdraw it.

In practice

Setting up a flat in about ten minutes

1

Add the people

One group for the flat. Flatmates do not need to install anything for you to track what they owe — though it works better when they do, because then they approve their own share.

2

Enter the rent cheque

One entry, the full amount, split the way you agreed. The app carries the balance forward instead of asking you to re-divide it every month.

3

Let the alerts do the typing

Turn on bank SMS capture and the DEWA debit or the card swipe at the supermarket arrives in your Financial Inbox already carrying the amount, date and merchant. You tag the split and approve.

4

Settle when someone pays

Record the transfer and both sides of the balance move. What is left over stays visible — in the group, and in your own net worth.

Compared

A shared flat, three different tools

Group chat + notes appA bill-splitting appNetWorth+
Uneven shares by roomManual, every timeYesYes, saved per expense
Recurring monthly billsRe-typed each monthUsually manualScheduled, posts itself
Amounts filled from bank alertsNoNoYes, on device, you approve
Multi-currency (you pay AED, they repay in INR)NoSometimes, at today's rateYes, rate recorded on the day
What you are owed counts toward net worthNoNoYes
Your own salary and savings stay privaten/an/aYes, sharing is scoped and read-only
Needs a bank loginNoNoNo, never

Bill-splitting apps are good at splitting. The gap this fills is what happens next: the balance sitting in that app is money, and until it is counted, your own picture is wrong by exactly that amount.

What this does not do

NetWorth+ does not move money. It will not pay your flatmate, settle a balance through a bank transfer, or connect to your account to check whether they actually sent it — you record the settlement yourself once it lands. It is not a rent collection service and it does not run credit checks on anybody. It is a record, kept accurately.

Where this applies

Across the Gulf, and beyond it

Shared accommodation is the normal way to live in the Gulf, and the mechanics change street by street: annual cheques in Dubai, a DEWA account in one name in Sharjah, an electricity bill split six ways in Riyadh, a compound villa in Al Khobar, a flat share in Doha or Manama. NetWorth+ reads the local currency and the local bank alert formats in each of these markets.

NetWorth+ also covers India, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, the United Kingdom and the United States. Currency handling is not limited to the list above — three-decimal dinars and zero-decimal currencies are treated correctly rather than being forced into two decimal places.

Questions

Good to know

Do my flatmates need the app for this to work?
No. You can track what everyone owes without anyone else installing anything — useful when one flatmate is uninterested or leaving soon. When they do install it and join the group, they approve their own share of each expense, which removes the argument about whether they agreed to it.
We split rent unequally because the rooms are different sizes. Can it handle that?
Yes. Splits can be set by percentage, by share, or as fixed amounts per person, and the split is remembered against that expense. A partition at AED 1,800 and a master room at AED 3,400 in the same flat is a normal setup, not a workaround.
Someone is moving out halfway through the rent cheque. What happens to the balance?
Their balance stays where it is until it is settled. You record what they pay you or what you return to them, and the running total adjusts. Nothing is deleted, so if there is a disagreement two months later the history is still there.
I pay the bills in dirhams but my flatmate repays me in rupees. Does that work?
Yes. Each entry records the exchange rate in force on the day it happened, so a repayment made in March is valued at March's rate rather than being silently restated at today's rate. That matters when the balance sits open for months.
Can my flatmates see my salary or my savings?
No. Sharing is scoped: you share the shared-expense view, not your ledger. Your accounts, income, budgets and goals are not part of what they can see, access is read-only, and you can withdraw it at any time.
Is it really free?
Yes, and there are no advertisements and no advertising SDKs in the app. NetWorth+ does not sell data — the business does not work that way, and the privacy policy says so in terms you can hold it to.

Keep reading

Where else this fits

Stop reconstructing the month from the group chat

One ledger for the flat, one figure for you, and a record that still makes sense when somebody moves out.

Android. No bank login. No ads. Message reading is optional and off until you switch it on.