Hissa
Telegram bot · Mini App · website
Hissa takes money that several people spent together and gives every person a net balance: what they put in, minus what they owed. It then pairs the people who owe with the people who are owed so that the number of money transfers drops to the smallest it can be — dozens of transfers turn into a handful. There is nothing to sign up for, nothing to install and no card number to hand over.
Worked example
The whole thing rests on one short formula. Once you have seen it work on a real bill, it is obvious why the answer comes out the way it does.
balance = paid in − must pay
A person with a positive balance should get money back; a person with a negative balance should hand money over. All the balances added together always come to exactly zero. Who pays whom does not matter at all — what matters is that every balance ends up at zero. That freedom is precisely what makes it possible to cut the number of transfers.
Kozimjon closed the whole bill — 100,000 sum. Aziz put in 20,000 sum for the tea. The five of them spent 120,000 sum in total, so each person’s share is 24,000 sum. Now look at what each person’s balance comes to. In the app the two input columns are called “Qo’shgan summasi” (how much you paid in) and “To’lashi kerak” (how much you must pay).
| Person | Paid in | Must pay | Balance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kozimjon | 100,000 | 24,000 | +76,000 |
| Aziz | 20,000 | 24,000 | −4,000 |
| Nozimjon | 0 | 24,000 | −24,000 |
| Sardor | 0 | 24,000 | −24,000 |
| Jasur | 0 | 24,000 | −24,000 |
| Total | 120,000 | 120,000 | 0 |
4 transfers instead of 8
Done the usual way, every person would have sent their share separately to every person who paid, and that comes to eight transfers. Hissa produced four, and every single balance landed on zero.
This is the exact point where people get it wrong. The feeling that somebody who paid into the pot cannot possibly be in debt is a strong one, but the arithmetic says otherwise. Aziz’s share is 24,000 sum and he put in 20,000 sum, so his balance is −4,000. He still has 4,000 sum to hand over. What counts is not how much you paid in, but the gap between what you paid in and what you owe.
Once the balances are on the table, the problem takes a much simpler shape: on one side stand the people waiting to be paid back, on the other the people who have to pay. You can pair them up any way you like and the accounts still come out right. So the question stops being “who should pay whom” and becomes “what is the smallest number of transfers that closes this”.
Hissa answers that in two ways. The fast method pairs the largest debtor with the largest creditor, and repeats. It always works, and it never needs more transfers than one fewer than the number of people. The exact method splits the balances into as many groups as possible in which the balances inside the group already add up to zero: each such group settles within itself, and the more groups there are, the fewer transfers are left over. That is a proven minimum.
Up to twenty people, Hissa uses the exact method. Above that it switches to the fast one, and it does not hide the fact — it writes “Ishtirokchi ko’p bo’lgani uchun tezkor usul ishlatildi” on the screen, which means there were too many people, so the fast method was used. The fast method almost always lands on the smallest number anyway; in a small fraction of cases it produces one transfer more than it strictly had to.
Introduction
Whenever a few people spend money together — a trip, a cafe, a birthday present, the office kitchen — the same question follows: who owes whom, and how much. The usual answer is that every person sends their own share separately to every person who paid something. That adds up to far more transfers than anyone expects. Take ten people, four of whom bought something out of their own pocket, and you are looking at thirty-six separate money transfers.
Hissa takes a different route. It works out each person’s net balance: what they put in, minus what they should have paid. A person with a positive balance gets money back, a person with a negative balance hands money over. The people who owe are then paired with the people who are owed in the way that produces the fewest transfers — at most nine instead of thirty-six.
You do not sign up, install anything or type in a card number. It behaves the same in a Telegram group, in a private chat with the bot and in an ordinary browser: you fill in two columns — how much each person put in and how much each person should pay — and Hissa does the rest.
Hissa never moves money and never asks anyone for money. It does the arithmetic and nothing else: it tells you who should hand how much to whom, and the people involved make the transfers themselves, in whatever way suits them.
The problem
After a day of spending together, nobody can hold the accounts in their head: one person paid for the taxi, another closed the bill, a third never joined in at all. Hissa turns two columns into a clear answer — who pays, who receives, and exactly how much.
If every person settles separately with every person who paid, the number of transfers climbs with the size of the group. Hissa pairs the balances instead and pushes that number down to the minimum. In most cases a few transfers close the whole account.
Done by hand, the amounts break into fractions and a few sum go missing at the end. Hissa works in whole sum only, and it checks by itself that the transfers bring every balance back to exactly zero.
People do not always pay the same amount: one of them ordered for two, another only had tea. Writing the second column by hand handles those cases correctly, and when everyone really does pay the same, one button fills the column in for you.
The result lands in the group chat itself, so nobody has to pass screenshots around and nobody gets to say they were told a different number. Any member of the group can fill the table in.
Getting started
If you are working alone, open @hissa37_bot in a private chat. If you are settling up with a group of people, add the bot to that group.
The bot replies with “📋 Hisob tayyor” and a “📝 Hisobni ochish” button, and the button opens the table screen. If you would rather use it without Telegram, the home page of the site opens that same table directly.
Use “Odam qo’shish” to add a card for each person, then fill in their name and the “Qo’shgan summasi” column. If somebody paid several separate times, use the “+” next to the field to write each payment on its own line. A person who paid nothing keeps a 0 — they still have to be on the list.
Write each person’s share into the “To’lashi kerak” column. If everyone is paying the same, there are two ways to avoid it: press “Taqsimlash”, or leave the column completely empty — the app fills it in at the next step.
The two column totals have to be identical. When they are not, the app tells you which column is short and by how many sum, and you correct it. If you left the column completely empty, you can skip this step.
The screen shows who should give how much to whom, and how many transfers that takes — “4 ta o’tkazma (8 ta o’rniga)”, for example, meaning 4 transfers instead of 8. If the “To’lashi kerak” column was empty, the app splits the total evenly first and says so: “«To’lashi kerak» bo’sh edi — teng bo’lindi”.
If you opened the table from Telegram, the “Yuborish” button posts the result into that chat and confirms with “✓ Chatga yuborildi”. On the website there is no such button — the result stays on the screen.
In the chat
The bot replies and button labels below are the real ones, copied as they are — Hissa speaks Uzbek and has no English, so this is exactly what you will see in Telegram, with an explanation next to each one. The names and amounts come from the five friends in the example above.
The moment it joins a group, the bot introduces itself once and says what to do first. It writes nothing else — it does not fill the group with messages. The Uzbek says: hello, I help split expenses; to start, /start.
Cafe bill
group
👋 Salom! Men xarajatlarni bo’lishga yordam beraman.
Boshlash uchun: /start
In a group and in a private chat alike, everything begins with this command. The bot sends one message and one button, and the button opens the table screen. In a group that button leads to the single account belonging to that group. The reply reads “the account is ready — enter who paid in how much and who pays how much, and I will work out who should give how much to whom”, and the button says “open the account”.
Cafe bill
group
/start
📋 Hisob tayyor
Kim qancha qo’shgani va kim qancha to’lashini kiriting — men kim kimga qancha berishini hisoblab beraman.
Once the table has been calculated you press “Yuborish” and the result arrives in the group chat as a message. It carries two things: the total spent and the list of transfers. There is no button on it and nothing else written around it. “💸 Jami” means the total.
Cafe bill
group
💸 Jami: 120 000 so’m
• Nozimjon → Kozimjon — 24 000 • Sardor → Kozimjon — 24 000 • Jasur → Kozimjon — 24 000 • Aziz → Kozimjon — 4 000
Sometimes everyone has already paid their own share and no balance differs from zero. A message still arrives, but a single line stands where the list of transfers would be: nobody owes anybody anything.
Cafe bill
group
💸 Jami: 120 000 so’m
Hech kim hech kimga qarzdor emas.
This reply lives in the bot itself and walks through the whole flow in four steps: /start opens the account and gives you a button; the button lets you enter two amounts for each person, what they paid in and what their share is; “Hisoblash” opens once the two column totals match; “Yuborish” drops the result into the chat. It closes by saying that when everyone pays the same, the “Taqsimlash” button fills the column in for you, and it links to this page.
@hissa37_bot
bot
/yordam
Hissa qanday ishlaydi
1. /start — hisob ochiladi va tugma chiqadi 2. Tugmani bosib, har bir odam uchun ikki summani yozasiz: • Qo’shgan — o’rtaga qancha pul qo’shgan • To’lashi kerak — ulushi qancha 3. Ikkala ustun yig’indisi tenglashgach «Hisoblash» ochiladi 4. «Yuborish» — natija shu chatga tushadi
Hamma teng to’lasa — «Taqsimlash» tugmasi ustunni o’zi to’ldiradi.
📖 To’liq qo’llanma: https://projects.mezes.uz/hissa
Commands
| Command | Where | What it does | Label in the menu |
|---|---|---|---|
/start | group + private chat | Opens the account and gives you the “📝 Hisobni ochish” button | Hisobni ochish |
/yordam | group + private chat | Explains how it works | Qanday ishlaydi |
/help | group + private chat | The same as /yordam | — |
In a group you can also write the command with the bot’s name attached: /start@hissa37_bot. The menu labels above are the Uzbek ones Telegram shows — “Hisobni ochish” means open the account, “Qanday ishlaydi” means how it works. There are no other commands, and if you send the bot something it does not recognize it does not reply at all.
The app
These labels come straight from the app, and since Hissa has no English they are shown in Uzbek with an explanation beside each one. Amounts appear in the app’s own format, as 24,000 so’m. On the result screen further down, “Yuborish” is the send button, “Yuborilmoqda…” means it is sending, “✓ Chatga yuborildi” means it reached the chat, and “4 ta o’tkazma (8 ta o’rniga)” is the app’s way of saying 4 transfers instead of 8. When nothing needs to move, the screen reads “O’tkazma kerak emas — Hamma o’z ulushini to’lagan”: no transfer needed, everyone has paid their share.
Both amount columns can hold more than one field. When a column has several, the person’s own total appears under their card — what they paid in on the left in green, what they must pay on the right in blue. Below the cards stands the total for the whole list.
Before it clears anything the app asks “Butun ro’yxat tozalansinmi? Buni qaytarib bo’lmaydi.” — should the whole list be cleared, this cannot be undone — and once it has, it says “Tozalandi”, meaning cleared.
4 ta o’tkazma (8 ta o’rniga)
O’tkazma kerak emas
Hamma o’z ulushini to’lagan.
This is the case you will hit most often, and the app does not hide it: it spells out how big the gap is and which column is short. Until you even the columns up, “Hisoblash” stays closed — with the single exception of a “To’lashi kerak” column that is completely empty. The Uzbek below says the two columns are not equal, gives both totals, notes that the “To’lashi kerak” column is 20,000 sum short, and reminds you that the two totals have to be identical before an answer can appear.
Ikki ustun teng emas Qo’shgan summasi: 120,000 so’m To’lashi kerak: 100,000 so’m «To’lashi kerak» ustuni 20,000 so’mga kam. Ikkala ustun yig’indisi bir xil bo’lishi kerak — shundan keyin hisob chiqadi.
Warnings
These lines appear when something interrupts the flow. They show up as a short strip at the bottom of the screen and fade away on their own. The wording is the app’s own, in Uzbek; the left column tells you when you will see each one.
| Situation | What the app says |
|---|---|
| The table is still empty | Avval ism va summalarni kiriting. |
| Calculated with no shares filled in | «To’lashi kerak» bo’sh edi — teng bo’lindi |
| One column already holds twenty fields | Bu ustunga bundan ko’p maydon qo’shib bo’lmaydi |
| The connection dropped | Ulanish yo’q — o’zgarishlar saqlanib turibdi |
| Opened with no connection | Ulanish yo’q — jadval shu qurilmada ochildi |
| The result did not reach the chat | Chatga yuborilmadi |
| You are not a member of the group | Siz bu guruh a’zosi emassiz |
| The app has been left open a long time | Sessiya eskirgan — ilovani qayta oching |
Where it runs
It is one product that opens in four different places, and it behaves slightly differently in each. Worth knowing the differences before you start.
Typing /start in a group opens that group’s single account — one chat, one account. Any member of the group can fill the table in, and somebody who is not a member cannot get into it at all. The finished result lands in that same group; in a forum-style group it lands in the topic it was started from.
In a private chat with the bot, /start opens the table in a single tap. This is also where /yordam lives — it gives a short explanation of how the whole thing works.
The table opens inside Telegram itself: name rows, two amount columns, “+ Odam qo’shish” to add a person, “Taqsimlash” to split evenly, “Tozalash” to clear, “Hisoblash” to calculate, and “Yuborish” to send the finished result. It follows your Telegram theme and it keeps working while the connection is down.
The home page of the site is the table screen itself: there is no landing page in the way, you start working straight away. Here the whole calculation happens in your browser and the “Yuborish” button is not shown at all — there is no chat to send anything to.
Features
Every person gets two numbers: “Qo’shgan summasi”, how much they put into the pot, and “To’lashi kerak”, how much their share comes to. Those two columns are the whole basis of the calculation.
Next to every amount field there is a “+” button that adds another field to the same column. So the taxi, the cafe and the shop can each go on their own line and you never have to add them up yourself. The person’s figure for that column is the sum of those fields, and it is shown under their card.
If everyone is paying the same, you do not have to type the second column at all: the “Taqsimlash” button divides the total by the number of people and fills the column in. When the total does not divide evenly, the remainder is handed out one sum at a time to people picked at random, so the two columns match exactly and the same person is not always the one paying the extra.
The number is formatted as you type it — put in 1250000 and the field shows 1,250,000. Shorthand works too: 1250k and 1,25 mln are both understood.
The two column totals have to be identical. When they are not, the app tells you exactly what the gap is — which column is short and by how many sum. There is one exception: if nobody at all has a “To’lashi kerak” value, “Hisoblash” stays available.
If you write nothing in the “To’lashi kerak” column for anybody, pressing “Hisoblash” makes the app divide the total evenly by itself and write the shares into the fields on the screen, with the line “«To’lashi kerak» bo’sh edi — teng bo’lindi” to say the column was empty so it was split evenly. You can see what it did and change it if you want to.
If you opened the table from Telegram, the “Yuborish” button posts the finished result into that chat, so everybody is reading the same list.
Every chat has its own account and it stays in that chat. An account opened in a group can be filled in by any member of that group.
Filling the table in and calculating carry on without internet — the app says so when the connection goes, and your changes are kept.
Opened inside Telegram, the table picks up the colors of your Telegram theme. In a browser it opens as a page in its own right.
Trust
There are no fractions anywhere in the calculation — every amount comes out as a whole number of sum, so nothing disappears in the rounding.
Hissa checks that the transfers it produced bring every person’s balance to exactly zero. If that check fails, it gives you no result at all — showing nothing beats showing a wrong answer.
The calculation is deterministic. Run the same table twice and you get exactly the same list of transfers back. Nothing is left to chance.
Any given pair appears on one line and one line only. You will not see “Sardor → Kozimjon” listed twice — the amounts are merged into a single line.
When the result goes to the chat it is recalculated from scratch, so the list that lands in the chat is guaranteed to match the table it came from.
Privacy
There is no sign-up in Hissa and it never asks for an email address. What is kept, and where, is written out below — including the part you may not like.
While you are filling the table in, both the names and the amounts stay on your own device. They are not sent to the server and they are not stored there.
When you press “Yuborish”, the result is calculated and arrives in the chat as a message — but no name, no amount and not even the result itself is kept. There is no list you can go back to later to find an account you sent; it only exists as that message in the chat.
What does stay on the server has nothing to do with the contents of an account: the Telegram account and group name the bot needs in order to work, an open session, and a count of how many calculations have been run. Who owes how much to whom is not written down anywhere.
We are not going to hide this: because the table lives on your device, clearing your browser storage wipes it. It will not open on another device either. On top of that, the app deletes a table by itself once it has gone six months (180 days) untouched. So use Hissa as a tool for settling one account at a time, not as a long-term ledger — if you send the result to the chat, that is where it stays.
Limits
This one is not optional: if the “Qo’shgan summasi” total does not equal the “To’lashi kerak” total, no result appears and the app tells you exactly what the gap is. The only exception is a “To’lashi kerak” column that nobody has filled in at all — there, “Hisoblash” splits the total evenly by itself.
A single column on a single person can hold at most twenty fields. Go past that and the app says “Bu ustunga bundan ko’p maydon qo’shib bo’lmaydi” — no more fields can be added to this column.
There is one account per chat. To start a fresh one you empty the table with “Tozalash”, and clearing cannot be undone.
Hissa does not guess anyone’s share — you fill in the “To’lashi kerak” column. When the split should be even there are two ways to get it: press “Taqsimlash”, or leave the column completely empty and press “Hisoblash”. Either way the shares are written into the fields on the screen, so you can see what happened.
A group’s account can be filled in by any member of that group; somebody who is not a member cannot open it.
When there are a great many transfers, the message that lands in the chat arrives shortened, because of Telegram’s own limits. The full list on the screen is unaffected.
Accounts are kept in sum and there is no currency conversion. Because everything is in whole sum, fractions and lost coins never come up.
The bot and the table screen are both in Uzbek only. There is no way to switch languages.
Questions
Because Hissa does not settle every single payment separately. It works out each person’s net balance first — what they put in, minus what they should pay — and then pairs the people who owe with the people who are owed. Who pays whom does not matter; what matters is that every balance ends at zero. In a group of ten where four people paid for something, the usual approach needs 36 transfers; going through the balances leaves at most 9.
Yes, and this is exactly where people get confused. In the example Aziz put in 20,000 sum, but his share is 24,000 sum, so his balance is −4,000 and he still owes 4,000 sum. What counts is not how much you paid in, but the gap between what you paid in and what your share is.
The table is kept on your own device and never written to the server. Even when you press “Yuborish”, no name, no amount and not the result itself is stored — the result is calculated and posted to the chat, and that is all. There is no sign-up and no email address is ever asked for.
Yes. Because the table lives on your device, clearing your browser storage wipes it, and it will not open on another device. The app also deletes a table by itself once it has gone six months (180 days) untouched. It is a draft, not a backup. If you need to keep the result, send it to the chat — then the account survives as a message there.
Yes. The website stands on its own and its home page is the table screen itself, with nothing to sign up for. In that case the whole calculation happens in your browser, and the “Yuborish” button is not shown, because there is no chat to send anything to.
No result appears and “Hisoblash” stays closed. The app shows you the gap precisely: which column is short and by how many sum, plus a reminder that the two column totals have to be identical. Even them up and the answer appears right away. There is one exception: if nobody at all has a value in the “To’lashi kerak” column, the button stays available and pressing it splits the total evenly.
No, and there are two ways to avoid it. The first is the “Taqsimlash” button: it divides the total by the number of people who have a name written in and fills in the “To’lashi kerak” column. The second is to leave that column completely empty and press “Hisoblash” straight away — the app splits it evenly itself and says “«To’lashi kerak» bo’sh edi — teng bo’lindi”, meaning the column was empty so it was split evenly. In both cases, if the total does not divide evenly — 100,000 by 3, say — the remainder is added one sum at a time, and who carries it is picked at random, so the extra sum does not always land on the first person. Typing by hand is for the uneven cases, such as somebody who ordered for two.
You can enter each payment on its own line: the “+” button next to an amount field adds another field to that column. So you might write 30,000 for the taxi and 120,000 for the cafe on two lines, with no adding up on your part. That person’s figure for the column is the sum of those fields and it is shown under their card. An extra field is removed with the trash icon beside it. A column holds at most twenty fields.
The calculation checks itself every time: the transfers have to bring every person’s balance to exactly zero. If that check fails, no result is given at all. Beyond that, the calculation is deterministic — the same table always produces the same answer — and it works in whole sum only, so nothing is lost to rounding.
Up to twenty people, Hissa uses the exact method, which gives the proven smallest number of transfers. Above that it switches to the fast method and says so openly on the screen: “Ishtirokchi ko’p bo’lgani uchun tezkor usul ishlatildi”, meaning the fast method was used because there were many participants. The fast method almost always lands on the smallest number too; in a small fraction of cases it produces one transfer more.
No, there is one account per chat. To start a new one you empty the table with “Tozalash”, and the app asks first: “Butun ro’yxat tozalansinmi? Buni qaytarib bo’lmaydi.” — should the whole list be cleared, this cannot be undone. If you need separate accounts, keep them in separate chats.
Any member of the group. Somebody who is not a member cannot get into the table and is told “Siz bu guruh a’zosi emassiz”, meaning you are not a member of this group. In a forum-style group, the result lands in the topic it was started from.
As plain numbers — the field formats them as you type, so 1250000 shows on screen as 1,250,000. Shorthand is understood too: 1250k, or 1,25 mln. The currency is sum and only sum.
Filling the table in and calculating both carry on without a connection, and the app tells you where you stand: “Ulanish yo’q — o’zgarishlar saqlanib turibdi”, meaning there is no connection but your changes are being kept. You only need a connection to send the result to the chat.
Two. /start opens the account and gives you the “📝 Hisobni ochish” button, and /yordam briefly explains how it works (/help does the same thing). There are no others — the bot does not reply to a command it does not know. In a group you can also write a command as /start@hissa37_bot.
Uzbek, and only Uzbek. Both the bot’s messages and the labels on the table screen are in Uzbek, and there is no language switch.
Wrap-up
Open the bot, or add it to your group and type /start. Fill in the two columns and who owes how much to whom comes out in a few seconds.
Open it in Telegram, or add it to your group.
For using it without Telegram — the home page is the table screen itself.