Group Expenses
Somebody always fronts the Airbnb. Somebody else buys the groceries, and someone pays for dinner on the last night because it is easier than four cards at one till. A group in Pocket Clear is the place all of that goes, so at the end nobody has to reconstruct a week from a bank statement.
What a group is
A group is a shared list of people and the costs between them. It is deliberately kept apart from your own budget: your personal transactions stay yours, and a group is a separate record of who paid for what on behalf of whom.
You will find groups under Settings › Groups.
Trip or ongoing
When you create a group you pick one of two kinds, and the only real difference is whether it ever finishes.
- Trip — ends on a date. Good for a holiday, a weekend away, a wedding.
- Ongoing — no end date. Good for flatmates, a couple, a standing arrangement with a sibling.
You can change the name later. Nothing about the split depends on which kind you chose.
Adding people who do not have the app yet
This is the part most apps get wrong, so it is worth being clear about: you do not have to wait for anyone to install anything.
Tap Add person, type their name, and they are in the group immediately. They can be recorded as having paid for things, and money can be owed to and by them, from that moment. Pocket Clear calls this a placeholder — it is a real seat in the group that simply does not have an account attached to it yet.
Why it works this way: a group gets set up at a kitchen table or in an airport queue, and if setup is blocked on the slowest person in the group installing an app, the trip is over before anyone has entered anything.
Invite links are coming soon
Invite links are not switched on yet. Everything else on this page works today: you can create a group, add everyone by name, record who paid for what, see the balances, settle up and put your own share into your budget. What you cannot do yet is hand someone a link that claims their seat.
It is written and tested; it is held back because we are not happy with how the invite codes themselves are generated and expired, and we would rather ship that properly than ship it early. When it is ready, this is how it will work.
Every person in a group will have their own invite link. Tap Send invite link next to their name and share it however you normally would — a message, an email, the group chat.
When they open the link they see who added them and to which group. If they already have Pocket Clear, opening it puts 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 — the one with their name on it and everything already recorded against it. Nothing they were owed, and nothing they owe, is lost in the handover. Each link works once; once a seat is claimed, that link is spent.
Who can do what
Anyone in the group can add and correct an expense. In practice the person who paid usually has their phone in their pocket at the moment the bill lands, and a rule that only they may enter it means the expense is entered wrong and then stays wrong. Every change records who made it, so the protection is that everyone can see what happened rather than that most people are locked out.
Removing an expense is different, because other people may already have acted on it. That stays with the person who paid and the person who created the group, and a removed expense is shown as removed rather than quietly disappearing.
Splitting an expense
When you add an expense you say who paid, how much, and who it was for. Then you pick how to divide it:
- Equally — the default, and what nearly every bill wants. If the amount does not divide cleanly, the odd pennies go to the first people in the list rather than vanishing; the shares always add up to exactly what was paid.
- Exact amounts — you type what each person's part was. Useful when 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.
- By shares — you give each person a weight. Two adults and a child on a family room becomes 2, 2, 1. A person with a weight of zero pays nothing for that expense and stays in the group for everything else.
Anyone in the group can be the payer, and anyone can hold a share — including someone who has not installed the app yet. The person who has not joined yet is a full participant in the maths from the moment you add their name.
Balances
The Balances screen is the answer to "where do we stand". It shows what you are owed or what you owe, and then the same for everyone else in the group.
Balances are worked out fresh every time you open the screen, from the expenses themselves. Nothing is stored and kept up to date behind your back, so what you see can only ever be a reflection of the expenses that are actually there.
Currencies are kept apart. If the group spent euros and pounds you will see a euro balance and a pound balance, not one blended number. They are only brought together at the moment somebody actually settles.
Settling up
Settle up takes the tangle of who-owes-whom and collapses it into the shortest list of payments that clears everything. In a group of six that usually means three or four payments instead of fifteen. Everybody's phone works this out the same way, so nobody is looking at a different set of instructions.
When a payment happens, one of you records it and the balance updates for everyone.
Settling up records a payment, not new spending. Your share of the trip is added to your budget separately. This is worth reading twice, because it is the thing most likely to be misread. If you pay a friend back €45, you have not spent €45 again — you spent it on the night, and that is what goes in your budget. Recording the repayment on top would count the same money twice.
If the payment really did move money between two accounts you track in Pocket Clear — you took cash out of the current account to hand over — you can tick a box to record that 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.
Adding your share to your budget
This is the part no other splitting app can do, because no other splitting app has your budget.
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. And you see your €45 whether or not you have paid him yet.
Everything is ticked to begin with, so the ordinary path is to check it and confirm. You can set the category for all of them in one go, 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, which is the one thing that must never happen.
Before you confirm, Pocket Clear tells you exactly which months it is about to change — a two-week trip over a month boundary changes two of them, and finding that out afterwards is not a pleasant surprise.
If you are not ready, close it. Nothing is lost. The group keeps a note saying how many shares are still waiting, and it is there whenever you come back. It never expires.
Different currencies in one group
Costs are recorded in the currency they were actually paid in, and they are never silently converted. A group that spent euros and pounds shows euros and pounds. Converting at the moment of entry would mean yesterday's numbers changed overnight as rates moved, and everybody's phone would quietly disagree about what is owed.
What it costs
Creating a group needs Pro, and so will joining one when invites arrive. That is not a pricing decision so much as a physical one: a group lives on our servers rather than on any single phone, and Pocket Clear only ever puts anything on a server for people with Pro and Cloud Sync switched on. Without both, there is nowhere for a shared ledger to be.
Groups and trips
A group and a trip are separate things and neither needs the other. A trip is your own record of a period of time and your own budget for it; a group is a shared record of costs between people. They work well together — if you are away with friends you will usually want both — but a group of flatmates has no trip, and a solo trip has no group.
Not the same as splitting a transaction
Pocket Clear already has a feature called split transactions, and it is a different thing: that one divides 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. Both are free to use together.
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