Group expenses

1. Create the group and name it after the thing it is for — 'Flat 3B', 'Lisbon May', 'Sunday football'. A name that matches the real-world thing is easier to find later than 'Group 2'.
2. Choose a type: General, Trip, Home, Couple, Other.
3. Add the people who will be sharing costs.
4. Add the first expense. A group with no expenses in it does not tell anyone anything.

Separate groups for separate contexts is almost always right. A flat and a holiday involving the same four people should be two groups, because they get settled at different times and for different reasons.

Members can be invited by email address, phone number or an invite link you share however you like.

• People already on Expenddy join the group directly.
• People who are not on Expenddy yet can still be invited — the invitation is held against the email address or phone number you used, and attaches to their account when they sign up. The group and its history are waiting for them.
• On the mobile app you can pick people from your phone contacts instead of typing addresses.

One thing worth knowing: other members see your name, your profile photo, and the expenses and settlements you are part of. They do not see your email address or phone number. The full detail is in the Privacy Policy.

An expense in a group carries the amount, what it was for, the currency, who paid, who shares it, the split method, and optionally a category and a photo of the bill.

Categories

Group expenses can be filed under 12 categories — Food, Groceries, Transport, Travel, Entertainment, Shopping, Utilities, Rent, Health, Education, Sports, Bills — or left uncategorised. Categories are what make the spending charts useful later, so they are worth the extra tap.

Who shares it

Every expense lets you pick which members share it. Use it. An expense that only three of five people shared, split across all five, is the most common way a group ledger quietly becomes wrong.

Each member's balance is what they paid minus their share of everything. Expenddy shows what you owe and what you are owed, broken down by person.

Groups can optionally work the other way round: instead of one person fronting each cost and being reimbursed, everyone puts money into a shared pot first, and expenses are paid out of it.

This suits regular, predictable costs — a house kitty, a shared float for a trip, a team that buys supplies every week. It removes the reimbursement step entirely: nobody is out of pocket waiting to be paid back.

The pool is denominated in a single currency, fixed when it is first funded. Contributions in another currency are refused rather than silently converted at some rate nobody agreed.

• Activity feed. A chronological record of what changed in the group and who changed it.
• Settlement history. Every recorded payment, with its date and the two people involved. A settlement can be voided or edited, and the record is annotated rather than rewritten.
• CSV export.The whole group ledger exports to a CSV file from the group's settings, which opens in any spreadsheet program.

The export matters more than it sounds. It means the group's record is not trapped in the app: it can be checked, archived, or handed to somebody who wants to do their own arithmetic.

Leaving a group does not cancel money you owe or are owed — those are obligations between you and the other people, so settle up first.

Expenses you added stay in the group's ledger after you leave. This is deliberate: removing them would change what everyone else owes each other, possibly months after they relied on those numbers. The same principle applies if you delete your account.