How to Export Your Splitwise Data (and Switch Apps Cleanly)

Splitwise lets you download your expense history as a spreadsheet, but it does it one group at a time, and the option isn't where most people look for it. This walks through where the export lives, what ends up in the file, and the two things worth doing before you close the account.

Why You'd Want Your Data Out

Most people export for one of four reasons.

• You're leaving for another app: You want the history somewhere you can read it after the account is gone.
• You need the records: Shared business travel, a rental property split with a co-owner, or anything you might have to substantiate later.
• A living situation ended: Two years of rent, utilities, and groceries with a roommate you no longer live with is worth keeping a copy of, especially if there was any disagreement about it.
• You're closing the account: Deletion is irreversible and Splitwise doesn't hand the data back afterward.

That last one is the one to take seriously. Export first, delete second. There is no undo, and support cannot restore an account that has been permanently deleted.

Exporting a Group to CSV

Splitwise's export is per-group. Each group produces its own CSV file, and individual friendships (one-on-one expenses that don't belong to a group) export the same way. If you've used the app for a few years across several living situations and trips, expect to repeat this several times.

1. Sign in on the Splitwise website: Open splitwise.com in a browser. The export has historically been a website feature rather than a mobile one, so start there.
2. Open the group or friendship you want: Select it from the left sidebar. Friendships appear in the same list as groups.
3. Open the settings menu: Click the gear icon in the top right of the group view.
4. Choose the export option: Select the export spreadsheet item in that menu. A .csv file downloads immediately.
5. Repeat for every group and friendship: There's no single button that produces your whole account as one spreadsheet. Work down the sidebar until you have a file for each.

Splitwise's own help documentation also describes an export on mobile: open the group or friendship, scroll right through the horizontal menu at the top of the screen, and tap the export button at the end of it. Menu positions and labels shift between releases, and the export was web-only for a long stretch. If you can't find it on your phone, the website is the reliable path.

One detail worth planning around: the export gives you every transaction ever recorded in that group, with no date range option. If you only want last year's expenses, you'll be filtering the file yourself after it downloads.

What the Export Does and Doesn't Include

The CSV is a flat ledger. Each transaction is one row. There's a cost column holding the total amount of that transaction, and then one column per person in the group.

The per-person numbers are balance impacts, not shares, and the sign convention trips people up. A number is positive when that person paid for an expense or made a payment, and negative when they borrowed money for an expense or received a payment. Each row nets to zero across all the people columns. That's a useful property: if you sum a person's column down the whole file, you should land on their current balance in the group. It's the fastest way to sanity-check the export before you rely on it.

What doesn't come across is everything that isn't a column in a spreadsheet. Receipt images, comments on expenses, and the running conversation attached to a group stay in Splitwise. Payments and expenses also sit in the same list, so a settle-up appears as its own row alongside the dinner it paid for. Neither is a flaw in the export, but both matter if you're treating the CSV as a complete archive.

Splitwise Pro is commonly reported to include a full-account backup in JSON, downloadable from the website. Splitwise's own Pro feature page doesn't list it, so treat availability as uncertain rather than something to build a plan around. For most people the per-group CSVs are the practical answer, and they're available on the free tier. We covered what else sits behind that paywall in is Splitwise still free.

Settling Up Before You Leave

This is the step people skip, and it's the one that causes actual problems. A balance in Splitwise is a shared object. It exists between you and another person, and closing your account doesn't resolve it any more than deleting a text thread cancels a debt.

Splitwise is deliberate about this. It won't let you remove a group member who has a non-zero balance, because group balances have to sum to zero. If it let someone leave $180 in the red, the remaining members would collectively be owed money by nobody. That guardrail is a good thing, and it means you will run into it if you try to exit a group without settling first.

Work through it in this order.

• Bring every group to zero: Go group by group. Send or collect the money in real life, then record it in the app as a settle-up so the other person's ledger matches yours.
• Handle one-on-one balances separately: Non-group expenses with a friend live outside any group and need their own pass.
• Tell the group before you go: If you're the person who logged most of the expenses, the others are relying on your entries. A short message beats a group discovering the balances went quiet.
• Export after you settle, not before: Running the export last means the final settle-up payments are in the file. Otherwise your archive ends on an open balance that was actually paid.

Deleting a friend is a partial exception worth knowing. Splitwise will try to remove non-group expenses with that person, as long as doing so doesn't change anyone else's balances. Group expenses stay put unless the whole group is deleted. So removing a friend doesn't quietly erase your shared history, and it isn't a substitute for settling.

Deleting Your Account for Good

Splitwise separates deactivation from deletion, and they're not the same thing. Deactivating closes the account but doesn't erase your data. Deleting removes your personal information permanently.

To deactivate, open your account settings, scroll to the bottom, select the option to close your account, then enter your current password and confirm. Splitwise can also send a deactivation link by email if you'd rather not enter a password.

To delete permanently, go to the same close-your-account screen and look for the section covering permanent deletion of your data. Select the option to send an email, click the link in the message Splitwise sends, and follow the prompts. Routing it through email is intentional on their part, since it confirms the request came from the account owner.

A few things to expect:

• It takes time: Splitwise states the process may take up to 30 days, and that it's irreversible.
• Locked out accounts have a path: If you've already deactivated and can't sign in, email support@splitwise.com and ask them to handle the deletion.
• The app on your phone holds a copy: Previously synced data can remain on the device, so delete the app once the account is closed.
• Your CSVs need somewhere to live: A downloads folder isn't an archive. Move them to cloud storage before you finish.

Starting Clean Somewhere Else

Most people who switch expense apps don't migrate anything. Once balances are at zero, the history is a record rather than a live obligation, and rebuilding two years of settled expenses by hand in a new app buys almost nothing. Splitwise CSV importers exist in a handful of apps, but they're the exception, and the imported result is usually a flattened approximation of the original groups.

The approach that works for nearly everyone: keep the CSVs as your archive, settle to zero, and start the new app with current balances only. If a few genuinely open debts are carrying over, enter them as a single opening expense per person rather than replaying the transactions that produced them.

We build SplitterUp, so weigh this accordingly. It's worth a look if the specific things that pushed you out of Splitwise were the daily expense cap, ads, or paying for receipt scanning and multi-currency support. SplitterUp has no daily limit, no ads, item-level AI receipt scanning, multi-currency, and smart settlement optimization, and it's free for a limited time with no subscription. It runs on iOS, macOS, Android, and the web, which matters if your group is split across platforms. You can download it here.

It isn't the only option, and it may not be the right one for you. Tricount and Settle Up are both credible, and the honest comparison is in our roundup of the best expense splitting apps and our guide to Splitwise alternatives. Whichever you land on, do the export before you delete. That part is the same regardless of where you end up.