Trip expenses

1. Create a group of type Trip, named for the trip itself — 'Lisbon, May' rather than 'Holiday'.
2. Add everyone travelling, including anyone who is paying towards it but not coming.
3. Record the costs already paid: flights, the accommodation deposit, tickets booked months ago. These are the ones most often forgotten, because they were paid before anyone was thinking about tracking.
4. Agree what is shared. Accommodation and transport usually are; meals, drinks and gifts are where groups differ, so decide before rather than during.

The pre-trip expenses matter more than they look. Someone who paid for accommodation in March is often several hundred pounds down before the trip even starts, and that is exactly the figure people forget to net off at the end.

The whole method is one habit: record it when you pay it. Ten seconds at the table, while the amount is still on the card machine, replaces an evening of reconstruction later.

• Whoever pays, records. Not one designated bookkeeper — that person becomes a bottleneck and misses half of it.
• Set who shared it, every time. Two people took a taxi; four went to the museum; everyone ate. These differences are the whole reason the final numbers are not simply the total divided by the group.
• Photograph anything unusual. A large or confusing bill is worth attaching a photo of, so nobody has to take it on trust a fortnight later.
• Do not settle mid-trip. Transfers during the trip create more transactions, not fewer. Let the balances accumulate and settle once at the end.

This is where trip tracking most often goes wrong, and where Expenddy is deliberately strict.

Each expense is recorded in a currency, and balances are netted separately for each one. Expenddy does not convert between currencies and applies no exchange rate. A debt in euros is never cancelled by a payment in pounds.

That is a design decision rather than a missing feature. An automatic conversion means picking a rate — and a rate on which day? The day of the expense, the day of settling, or the day the card actually cleared? Any choice silently changes what someone owes. Expenddy leaves the rate to the people involved, who can agree one and record the settlement accordingly.

What this means in practice

• Record each expense in the currency it was actually paid in.
• You will see a balance per currency — say one in GBP and one in EUR.
• Settle each currency separately, or agree a rate between yourselves and record a single settlement in one currency.
• Supported currencies: USD, GBP, EUR, INR, CAD, AUD, AED, PKR.

If most of the trip was paid on cards in your home currency, the simplest approach is to record everything in that currency using the amount your bank actually charged you — that figure already includes your bank's rate and fees, and it is the number you genuinely paid.

Note the day trip: because only two people shared it, it never touched Mia's or Leo's balance. A system that split everything evenly would have charged all four £22.50 for a trip half of them did not go on.

When the trip is over, each person has one number. Pay it, record the payment as a settlement, and the balance clears. Expenddy keeps a dated history of each transfer, and a settlement recorded in error can be voided or edited.

Settle within a week. Balances left for months become awkward to raise, and trips are precisely the context where people are least willing to chase.

Once everyone is at zero, the group is worth keeping rather than deleting — it is the record of what the trip cost, which is genuinely useful when planning the next one. The ledger also exports to CSV.

Travel is one of the larger discretionary costs a household carries: UK households spent an average of £96.40 a week on transport in the financial year ending 2025, 14% of all spending, and that is before accommodation.^[1]

A group trip compresses several weeks of that into a few days, paid by whoever is nearest the card reader. It is the highest-velocity shared spending most people ever do, which is exactly why memory is not up to the job.