Dividing a commissary kitchen's pooled monthly costs by the number of tenants is the simplest possible split, and it needs no calculator at all. The problem is that "simple" and "fair" are only the same thing when every tenant uses the kitchen about the same amount — and in a shared commissary, they usually don't.
| Situation | Even split | What this calculator does |
|---|---|---|
| A tenant books far more hours than the others | Pays the same share as everyone else, regardless of how much of the kitchen's time they actually occupy. | Splits by hours booked (or blends it with storage), so a heavier user's share reflects the hours they actually used. |
| A tenant rents a full walk-in shelf but rarely cooks on-site | An hours-only intuition undercharges them; an even split overcharges the light-hours tenants to compensate for nothing in particular. | The storage-based or blended method counts dry, refrigerated, and freezer units separately, so a storage-heavy tenant's share reflects that. |
| A tenant with almost no usage this period | Still pays a full equal share. | Their proportional share is close to zero — they owe close to just their flat base fee, if one is charged. |
| Rounding the split to whole cents | A hand or spreadsheet split that rounds each tenant's share independently can leave a few cents of the pool unaccounted for. | A largest-remainder allocation guarantees every tenant total sums exactly to the pool total, to the cent. |
| Is anything I enter uploaded anywhere? | N/A | No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser; nothing is sent to a server. |
Nothing, if every tenant genuinely uses the kitchen about the same amount. It goes wrong the moment usage diverges: a tenant who books 40 hours a week and fills a walk-in shelf pays the same as one who stops in for 5 hours to prep, and the light user is quietly subsidizing the heavy one every month.
Because the two drive different costs. Booked hours track variable costs like utilities and staff oversight; storage units track a more fixed draw on the walk-in and freezer space regardless of how many hours a tenant is actually cooking. A tenant who rents a full walk-in shelf but rarely cooks on-site would pay almost nothing under an hours-only split, which is why the blended method exists.
Every dollar figure is tracked in integer cents internally, and the proportional shares are allocated with a largest-remainder method: each tenant's ideal share is rounded to the nearest cent, then any leftover or shortfall cent is assigned to the tenants whose rounded share moved furthest from their ideal one. A plain spreadsheet formula that rounds each share independently can leave a few cents of the pool unaccounted for; this calculator's tenant totals always sum exactly to the pool total.
No. This calculator only does the arithmetic on the costs, hours, and storage figures you enter. It does not draft, review, or enforce any agreement between the commissary operator and its tenants — that stays a conversation and a contract between the people involved.