SharedExpense is built for groups that live out of a common pot — a family, a couple, a flatshare, a trip — and want one honest total for what the group spends. It is not built to work out who owes whom.
Most apps in this space are built to work out who owes whom. SharedExpense is built to show a group what it collectively spends. If you live out of a common pot, the debt question was never the question you actually had.
A family paying for groceries out of a joint account does not need to know that Priya paid for Tuesday's shop and Alex paid for Thursday's. A couple splitting rent from one bank account is not owed anything by each other. What that household actually wants is one number: what did we spend this month, and where did it go. That is what a SharedExpense group gives you — a shared total and a shared breakdown, with no ledger of debts sitting underneath it.
That is a deliberate design decision, not a missing feature. If your group genuinely needs to settle up — splitting a dinner bill among friends who do not share finances — that is a different problem, and it is worth using a tool built for it.
A household group turns everyone’s spending into one running total, tagged by colour so it is never mixed up with your own personal expenses.
Creating a group takes one field: a name, with the app's own placeholder suggesting e.g., Family, Roommates, Trip to Paris. Every group gets a colour, and that colour tags every transaction logged to it in your expense list, so a family group and your own personal spending stay visually distinct even when they sit in the same list.
Anything logged to the group — by any member — lands in the group's shared history and counts toward its totals immediately. Nobody has to reconcile anything afterwards.
Add a flatmate by email and they are working from the same shared total within seconds — no accounts to set up on your end, no permissions to configure beyond who administers the group.
Type an email address into the group and one of two things happens. If it already belongs to a SharedExpense user, they are added to the group immediately. If it does not, an invitation email goes out and they join by signing in at the login page and picking up the group from there.
Roles are deliberately simple: there are exactly two. An owner — whoever created the group — can add and remove members and can delete the group entirely. A member can do everything day to day that matters, which is log expenses to the group, and can leave whenever they want. There is no tier of permissions beyond that.
A group does not have to be permanent. Create one for a two-week trip, log everything to it while you travel, and it behaves exactly like a household group — right down to getting counted separately so it never inflates your everyday spending.
“Trip to Paris” is the app's own example placeholder for a group name, and it is a real pattern, not a marketing example: a short-lived group works the same way a family group does. It gets its own colour, its own shared history, and its own running total that sits alongside your other groups rather than blending into them — which matters when you come home and want to know what the trip actually cost without it distorting your regular monthly numbers.
Pushing a category to a group gives the group its own independent copy — renaming it there never touches your personal category, and renaming yours never touches theirs.
Categories start out personal. When you push one to a group, SharedExpense clones it rather than linking it: the group gets its own copy, owned by the group, from that point on. If the family later renames “Pet Care” to “Dog Food”, that rename only affects the group's copy — your personal “Pet Care” category is untouched, and vice versa.
It is a small piece of ownership design, but it is what keeps a shared category from becoming a source of arguments about who gets to control its name.
An expense stays in a group’s timeline after the person who logged it leaves, so a past month’s total does not quietly shrink just because a member is gone.
Leaving a group only removes future access — it does not rewrite the past. Every expense a departing member logged while they were in the group stays exactly where it was, still counted in the months it belongs to. That matters for a household or a trip group that outlives any one person's membership: the group's history reads as an accurate record of what was actually spent, not a shifting number that depends on who is still around to be counted.
Summary shows a “Who spent it” card once more than one person has logged expenses, and Breakdown lets you view the same spending by Person or by Group, not just by Category — but none of it adds up to a balance.
| Name | Amount | Share | Txns |
|---|---|---|---|
| Priya | $540 | 54% | 14 |
| Alex | $310 | 31% | 9 |
| Sam | $150 | 15% | 6 |
Who logged the expense, not who owes what — this app does not do settlement.
That card only appears once there is more than one person to compare — labelling a solo household's expenses with the same one name every row would say nothing. Once it appears, it is a record of who logged what, not a claim about who is entitled to be paid back.
Breakdown carries the same idea further: alongside the usual Category view, it adds Person and Group dimensions, so you can see the full history by who spent it or which group it belonged to, with the same disclaimer attached wherever it appears.
A card headed “Across your groups” stays on screen even while you are filtered down to a single group, so a household running a Family group and a Trip group side by side can see both without switching back and forth.
Every other card on the report respects whichever group you have selected. This one deliberately does not: it is the one place a trip that is running hot stays visible while you are reading the household's everyday numbers, and it is what makes defaulting to a single group safe in the first place.
| Group | Amount | Share | Txns |
|---|---|---|---|
| Family | $2,140 | 78% | 31 |
| Trip to Paris | $605 | 22% | 8 |
Currency is set per account, not per group or per report — reports show one currency at a time and say plainly when spending in another currency has been left out, instead of converting it.
Each account you add has a currency, chosen from eleven supported currencies, and every expense inherits the currency of the account that paid it. A group whose members pay from accounts in different currencies is entirely normal — the app does not require a group to standardise on one.
What it will not do is guess an exchange rate to combine them. A report shows one currency at a time; if there is spending in a different currency within your current scope, it says so directly and lets you switch to see it, rather than folding it into a total that would need a conversion the app does not have. That is a stance, not an apology — converting currencies quietly is how shared reports become quietly wrong.
Knowing what a shared group refuses to do matters as much as what it offers.
Create a group, add the people in it, and start logging — SharedExpense is free, and nobody in the group will ever be shown a balance to settle.