Split expenses with friends without another account

A group is a second ledger, not a tag

In most apps, a shared trip is a label you stick on some of your expenses. Spendwise gives a group its own context: its own categories, its own monthly budget, its own people, its own transactions, its own notes and its own balances.

The point is that a holiday never pollutes the household numbers. Rent at home is not a category in "Voyage en France", and a friend's outstanding balance on the trip is not the same balance as their loan at home — even when the name is identical, they are two separate ledgers.

How a trip actually runs

1. Create the group and give it a name. It seeds a short starting set of categories for a trip or household.
2. Add the people you share costs with. They are entries in the ledger, not accounts — no phone number, no invitation, no app install.
3. Set a group budget for the month on the group's summary, separate from your own budget.
4. Log the shared expenses. Enter what you paid, with the category and date. When someone else covered your part, record that direction instead, so the balance does not run backwards.
5. Split the expense. Tag it with the people involved — equally, or with a share each. Every share moves that person's running balance.
6. Settle up when someone pays their part. The action opens the composer pre-filled with the outstanding balance and the correct direction, so recording a repayment is one tap and one confirmation. Partial payments are fine.

Balances that are calculated, not remembered

Every person's balance is the sum of their ledger entries, not a number someone typed. The entries cover the situations that actually happen: you lend cash, you cover their share of a bill, they cover yours, you borrow, they repay you, you repay them. A positive balance means you are owed; negative means you owe.

Because it is a derived sum, it cannot drift out of date. The trade is that a balance is only as good as what has been logged — if the group forgets to enter the taxi, the ledger is wrong, and one person keeping the book is what fixes that.

The honest trade: one phone holds the ledger

Group splitting apps with invitations exist, and they solve a different problem: letting every participant edit the same shared book from their own phone. That requires accounts and a server, which is exactly the architecture Spendwise does not have.

So the model here is one ledger, one keeper. It suits:

• a trip where one person books and pays for most things,
• a shared flat where one housemate settles the bills,
• any group where arguments come from fuzzy memory rather than mistrust.

It does not suit a household where everyone insists on editing the ledger live. If that is the requirement, read the Spendee comparison and pick a synced app; the page says plainly where this one loses.

What groups deliberately do not do

• No invitations or shared editing. The ledger is on your phone, so there is no one else to sync with.
• No people shared between contexts. A person can be copied into a group, but the copy has its own ledger; settling one never touches the other.
• No cross-group transfers. Money moves between people, not between ledgers.
• No group currency. The app has one display currency, and a group reports in it. There is no conversion.
• No netting across people. If Alex owes you and you owe Sam, those are two balances, not one.

Frequently asked questions