Six of you go away for a week. Dave fronts the apartment. You buy the groceries twice. Someone pays for dinner on the last night because four cards at one till is a nightmare. At the end there is a splitting app with a tidy list of who owes whom, everybody pays up, and the whole thing is settled.
And then your own budget has no idea any of it happened.
That is the gap. Not "how do we split the bill" — that problem has been solved well for over a decade. The gap is at the boundary between the group's ledger and your personal one, and it is a gap that every splitting app has, structurally, because a splitting app has no budget to hand anything to.
Pocket Clear now has Group Expenses, and the reason it exists is that last sentence.
First, credit where it is due
Splitwise is a good product. It has been doing this since 2011, its balances are correct, its debt simplification works, and an enormous number of trips have been settled fairly because it existed. If all you need is a shared ledger between friends, it will serve you well and I am not going to pretend otherwise to sell you something.
The limitation is not craftsmanship. It is scope. A splitting app knows what the group spent and what you owe. It does not know what your grocery budget is, what you have spent on eating out this month, or that the trip straddled two months. It cannot know, because it is not your expense tracker. So the last step — taking your genuine share of the week and putting it into your own record of your own money — is a step you do by hand, or, realistically, do not do at all.
What Pocket Clear has that a dedicated splitting app does not is the other side of that boundary.
What a group is
A group is a shared list of people and the costs between them. You will find them under Settings › Groups.
It is kept deliberately separate from your own budget. Your personal transactions stay yours; a group is a separate record of who paid for what on behalf of whom. The two only meet when you decide they should, which is the whole subject of the last section of this post.
When you create one you pick a kind, and the only real difference is whether it ever finishes:
- Trip — ends on a date. A holiday, a weekend away, a wedding.
- Ongoing — no end date. Flatmates, a couple, a standing arrangement with a sibling.
Nothing about the splitting maths depends on which you chose, and you can rename it later.
Who needs to pay
Creating a group needs Pro, and so will joining one when invites arrive. That is less a pricing decision than a physical one. A group is the one part of Pocket Clear that cannot live on a single phone — several people are writing to the same ledger, so it has to sit on a server. And Pocket Clear only ever puts anything on a server for people who have Pro with Cloud Sync switched on. Without both, there is nowhere for a shared ledger to be.
What that does not mean is that everyone has to sign up before you can start.
Nobody has to install anything first
This is the part most apps get wrong, and it is worth being blunt about.
Groups get set up at a kitchen table, or in an airport queue, or in the ten minutes before everyone's flight. If setting one up is blocked on all six people downloading an app and creating an account, the trip is over before a single expense has been entered. Everyone has lived through the version of this where two people never join and the whole thing collapses back into a WhatsApp thread and a mental tally.
So in Pocket Clear you tap Add person, type a name, and they are in. That is the whole flow. Pocket Clear calls it a placeholder, which undersells it: it is a real seat in the group. From that moment, that person can be recorded as having paid for things, money can be owed to them and by them, and they are a full participant in every calculation. They just do not have an account attached yet.
When invites arrive, each person will have their own invite link — tap Send invite link next to their name and share it however you normally would. Opening it shows them who added them and to which group. If they have Pocket Clear, it drops them straight into that seat. If they do not, the link sends them to the App Store or Google Play first and the seat is still waiting when they come back.
The link claims that exact seat, with everything already recorded against it. Nothing they were owed and nothing they owe is lost in the handover, so it does not matter at all whether they join on day one or three weeks after everybody got home. Each link works once; a claimed seat cannot be claimed again.
Three ways to split, and the pennies add up
When you add an expense you say who paid, how much, and who it was for. Then you divide it:
- Equally — the default, and what nearly every bill actually wants. When the amount does not divide cleanly, the odd pennies go to the first people in the list rather than evaporating. The shares always sum to exactly what was paid, which matters more over a week of restaurant bills than it sounds.
- Exact amounts — you type each person's part. Three of you had the set menu and one had the steak. Pocket Clear will not let you save until the parts add up to the total, and it tells you what the difference is so you are not hunting for it.
- By shares — you give each person a weight. Two adults and a child in a family room is 2, 2, 1. A weight of zero means that person pays nothing toward that particular expense and stays in the group for everything else — which is how you handle the friend who did not come to dinner without throwing them out of the trip.
Anyone in the group can be the payer, and anyone can hold a share, including someone who has not installed the app.
Who is allowed to do what
Anyone in the group can add and correct an expense. That is a deliberate choice and it goes against the instinct to lock things down.
The reason is that the person who paid usually has their phone in their pocket at the exact moment the bill lands, and a rule saying only they may enter it produces an expense that is entered wrong by whoever was free, and then stays wrong. Every change records who made it, so the protection is that everyone can see what happened — not that most people are locked out of fixing it.
Nothing is deleted, because other people acted on it
Removing an expense is a different matter, and it is handled differently.
Removal stays with the person who paid and the person who created the group. More importantly, there is no hard delete anywhere in groups. Voiding an expense leaves a tombstone: the group shows it as removed, with who removed it, rather than the row quietly vanishing and everybody's balance shifting for reasons nobody can reconstruct.
And once an expense has been referenced by a settlement, or has already been posted into somebody's own spending, it cannot be voided at all. It can only be corrected with a compensating entry — a second, visible record that adjusts it.
This is bookkeeping's oldest rule and it is the right one here. The alternative is an app where a number you paid real money against last Tuesday can be erased on Thursday by someone else's tap, and the trail of why your balance changed does not exist. In a shared ledger, the audit trail is the trust.
Currencies stay in the currency you paid
A group that spent euros and pounds shows a euro balance and a pound balance. Not one blended number. Costs are recorded in the currency they were actually paid in and are never silently converted.
The temptation is to convert at the moment of entry so that everything is in one tidy figure. Do that and yesterday's numbers change overnight as rates move: the €80 dinner is worth something different every time anyone opens the app, six phones quietly disagree about what is owed, and the disagreement is invisible because everybody is looking at a confident-looking single number.
So conversion happens at exactly one moment — settlement — and the rate used is frozen onto the settlement record. What you actually paid your friend, at the rate that applied when you paid it, stays true forever. Nothing recalculates behind you.
If you are also using Travel Mode for your own spending, the two are consistent with each other by design: both record what happened in the currency it happened in.
Balances and settling up
The Balances screen answers "where do we stand": what you are owed, what you owe, and the same for everybody else.
Balances are worked out fresh from the expenses every time you open the screen. Nothing is stored and maintained in the background, so what you see can only ever be a reflection of the expenses that are genuinely there — there is no cached total that can drift away from reality.
Settle up collapses the tangle of who-owes-whom into the shortest list of payments that clears everything. In a group of six that is usually three or four payments instead of fifteen. Every phone computes it the same way, so nobody is following different instructions. When a payment happens, one of you records it and it updates for everyone.
Here is the thing most likely to be misread, so it is worth reading twice: recording a settlement is a payment, not new spending. If you pay Dave back £45, you have not spent £45 again. You spent it on the night. Counting the repayment as well would count the same money twice, which is precisely the mistake people make when they try to run this by hand.
If the payment really did move money between two accounts you track — you took cash out of the current account to hand over — there is a tickbox to record it as a transfer. Transfers have never counted as spending in Pocket Clear and they do not here either. The box is off unless you turn it on.
The part no splitting app can do
Everything above is table stakes. This is the reason the feature exists.
At the end of a group — or whenever you like, from the group screen — Pocket Clear offers you your share of everything the group spent, ready to go into your own budget.
Dave fronted the £180 apartment. Your budget gets your £45 of it. Not his £180, which was never your money, and not nothing, which is what your budget records today. And you see your £45 whether or not you have paid him back yet, because you incurred it the moment the group agreed to it.
Everything is ticked to begin with, so the ordinary path is to glance at it and confirm. You set the category for all of them in one go and then change individual ones, along with the payment type and the note.
The amount and the date cannot be edited. They come from what the group agreed. Letting them drift would mean your own records quietly disagreed with what the group says you owe — one number in two places, slowly diverging, with no way to tell which is right. That is the one failure mode this feature must never have, so the two fields that define the fact are locked and everything descriptive is yours to change.
Before you confirm, Pocket Clear tells you which months it is about to change. A two-week trip over a month boundary changes two of them, and finding that out afterwards — when last month's budget has moved and you have no idea why — is not a pleasant surprise.
If you are not ready, close it. Nothing is lost. The group keeps a note of how many shares are still waiting and it is there whenever you come back. It never expires.
A dedicated splitting app cannot offer you this screen. Not because it is badly built, but because at the end of the flow it has nowhere to put the number. It can tell you that you owe Dave £45; it cannot put £45 of accommodation into September for you, because it does not have your September.
Two things it is not
A group is not a trip. They are separate and neither needs the other. A trip is your own record of a stretch of time and your own budget for it; a group is a shared record of costs between people. They pair well when you are away with friends and you will usually want both — but flatmates have no trip, and a solo trip has no group.
A group is not a split transaction. Pocket Clear already has split transactions, which divide a single receipt of your own across several categories — the supermarket shop that was partly groceries and partly household. Groups divide a cost between people. They are unrelated and free to use together.
Where to find it
Settings › Groups. Creating one needs Pro; joining one never will. The full walkthrough, including every splitting method and what each screen tells you, is in the help centre: Group Expenses.
If you have spent years running the trip in one app and your budget in another, and doing the join between them in your head or not at all — that is the part this closes.
Split the Trip, and Keep Your Budget Honest
Creating a group needs Pro with Cloud Sync on, and so will joining one when invites arrive — a shared ledger has to live on a server. Anyone without the app is added by name. Your share goes into your own budget when you are ready.