Collecting money for one bill, with everybody who joins sharing it

The kit is ordered, the deposit on the hall is paid, one person's card went down for the whole thing — and from that moment the money is out and somebody has to collect it back. This is the case CostDivider is unreasonably good at: the bill goes in once, everybody who joins takes a share of it, and every new name makes that share smaller for everybody already in. Whoever can only give a set sum gives that instead, and the rest is shared out around them.

To be clear about what this is not: CostDivider is not a crowdfunding platform. No money passes through it — no card, no payout, no account holding anything. It says who owes what, who has handed over what, and who is still out of pocket; the transfers happen in your banking app and get ticked off here. There is also no target field anywhere: the group's total expenses is the target, which is why the bill is the first thing you record.

In short

1. One group per collection, named after the thing: "New kit for the club".
2. Record the bill as an expense — with whoever paid it as the payer, or with no payer at all if nothing has left anybody's account yet.
3. Everybody gives alike? Leave "Split equally between all members" on. Somebody pledging a set sum? Switch to "Each member has their own share".
4. Add everybody who joins: the pledge as a fixed amount, everybody else on the same percentage.
5. Record what arrives as a deposit — to the group, or straight to whoever is out of pocket.
6. Watch the settlement plan get shorter, and lock the group when it is empty.

Every new member makes the share smaller

This is the whole mechanism, and it is worth seeing as arithmetic once. The kit cost 1,800.00. A local business pledges 500.00, which comes off the top and leaves 1,300.00 to be shared. From there it depends on nothing but how many people are carrying it:

• Four sharers: 325.00 each.
• Thirteen: 100.00 each.
• Twenty-six: 50.00 each.

Nothing about the bill changed. Only the number of shoulders — and you do not recalculate anything, because adding a member is the recalculation. Everybody's figure moves the moment the thirteenth person is added, on their screen as well as yours.

The setting that produces this is simple: give everybody the same percentage. The number itself does not matter as long as it is the same one — four members on 25 owe exactly what four members on 1 would owe, because CostDivider weighs the percentages against each other rather than against a literal 100. That is what lets you keep adding people without ever going back to fix the rows already there.

A percentage is a weight, not a promise of a particular sum. It is a claim on a share of whatever is left, divided among however many are holding a weight.

One caveat, on the group's settings page: this rebalancing is "Percentage normalization", and it is on for every new group. Turn it off and percentages are taken literally — a thirteenth member on 1 % then covers 1 % of the bill and relieves nobody, which is the opposite of what a collection wants.

The hole you start with is an expense, not a negative deposit

A collection starts in the red, and there are two ways in. Which one you have decides how you record it.

Somebody already paid. The invoice, the deposit on the hall, the down payment that had to go out to hold the booking: record it as an expense with that person as the payer. From that moment they stand in credit for the whole amount less their own share, everybody else stands in the red by theirs, and the settlement plan says who sends what to whom. This is the ordinary case, and the one the example at the bottom of this page shows.

Nothing has gone out yet and you are collecting first. Record the bill as an expense with no payer — "No payer recorded" in the "Paid by" list. Nobody is in credit, everybody is in the red by their share, and the two figures at the top of the group, total expenses against total deposits, are your thermometer: what is missing is the difference between them.

What you cannot do is enter the hole as a deposit with a minus in front of it. A deposit is always money coming in — the form takes nothing below 0.01 — and the thing being shared out is always an expense. That is not a limitation to work around; it is the distinction the whole settlement rests on. Expenses are what the shares are computed from, deposits are what settles them.

Who pledges a sum, and who shares the rest

A new group is created on "Split equally between all members", and for a collection where everyone gives the same that is the right answer with nothing to set up: each new member simply lowers everybody's share.

The moment one contributor is different — the sponsor giving 500.00 and nothing more, the parent who can manage 20.00, the club treasury putting in a set amount — that switch has to come off. It overrides every per-member setting, so while it is on, a fixed amount you typed is simply ignored. On the group's settings page choose "Each member has their own share" instead. Then:

• A pledge is a fixed amount. It comes off the total first and never moves again, however many people join later.
• Everybody else is a percentage, and percentages divide what is left after the fixed amounts — not the bill.
• Nobody is both. A member has one kind of share per group; if the sponsor also wants a share of the rest, that is a second group, not a second setting here.

The order is worth saying twice, because it is where a collection goes quietly wrong: fixed amounts first, percentages on the remainder. Add a second sponsor for 300.00 and the crowd's share drops from 1,300.00 to 1,000.00 — everybody on a percentage gets cheaper without anybody touching their row.

Adding thirty people at once

A collection lives or dies on how fast people can be added, and there are two ways, with a difference that matters more here than anywhere else in the app.

"Add several members" takes a list of names, one per line, up to 200 at a time, with one contribution setting for the whole list. No e-mail address is stored, nothing is sent, nobody is granted any right — and because each name creates a profile that did not exist a second ago, there is nobody to ask: they count in the settlement immediately. This is the tool for a collection. Set the type to Percentage and give the list a number, the same one for everybody. That box starts empty on purpose, and the one thing not to do is leave the form on its other default, a fixed amount of 0: thirty people who each owe nothing lower nobody's share.

An invitation by e-mail is the other way, and it is for people who should see their own standing and answer for themselves. It costs something, though: a pending invitation is invisible to the arithmetic — "not counted in the settlement until accepted". Thirty invitations sent out do not lower anybody's share by a cent until they are answered. Both ways mix freely in one group, and usually should: the people actually paying get an invitation, the rest of the roster gets typed in.

Where the money goes: to the group, or to the person out of pocket

Every deposit asks one question — "Paid to" — and in a collection the answer is not automatic.

If one person fronted the bill, contributions go to that person. Choose them as the recipient and the amount moves from the payer's balance to theirs: the contributor drops to zero, and the person owed comes 325.00 closer to whole. That is what the example below shows, and it is why Ben's deposits column carries a minus — money that has already reached him is no longer owed to him.

If the group itself is collecting — nobody has paid the bill yet, the money is going into a club account or a cash box — leave the recipient on "The group". Those are the deposits the group's "total deposits" figure counts, and the ones that make the thermometer work.

The catch, which the app states itself under the settlement plan: money in the group's pot cannot be paid out through the app. There is no payout record. So if the pot collects 1,800.00 and the treasurer then settles the supplier out of it, the plan will tell you the pot is holding money that belongs to somebody and that this part has to be handed over outside the app. Nothing is wrong with that — a cash box works exactly like that — but where one person is out of pocket from day one, paying them directly keeps every figure closing to zero without a footnote.

What the group shows while the collection runs

• Total expenses against total deposits, at the top: the bill, and what has been paid into the group toward it.
• "Who paid in", the participation chart, in two versions — expenses only, and expenses plus deposits. The second one is the picture of the collection.
• The settlement plan, which is the honest progress bar: it starts long, gets shorter, and when it is empty everybody is square.
• The public link, off until you switch it on, showing the group to anybody holding it — the bill, every member's share and balance, and every expense. Deposits get no column of their own there; they show up inside the balances.

Members who want to be told are told: a deposit landing, a new member joining and a change to how the costs are divided each raise a notification — the last of them with the sentence that matters here, that their own figure may have moved.

Getting paid without the app touching the money

Whoever is owed can put a payout address on their profile: an IBAN, which the app draws as a GiroCode QR with the amount and the reference already filled in, a PayPal.me name, or a Revolut one. A contributor scans it, their banking app opens with the right figure in it, and the payment happens between the two of them. CostDivider never receives, holds, forwards or initiates any of it — what it stores is an address its owner typed in, like a phone number in a profile, and the app builds the link itself so it cannot point anywhere else.

When it is over

Once the bill is covered, lock the group. That freezes the expenses — no new ones, no edits, no deletions — so the figure everybody's share was computed from stops moving. Deposits still work in a locked group, deliberately: the last two people paying up is exactly what a locked collection is still waiting for.

What is left is a closed record: the bill, everybody who carried a piece of it, what each of them owed and what each of them handed over. That is worth more than it sounds a year later, when somebody asks what happened with the kit money.

Five moves that keep a collection honest

• Record the bill before you add anybody. Shares are computed from the group's total, so a group of thirty with no expense in it tells all thirty of them they owe 0.00.
• Set your own share first. Whoever creates the group is added automatically with a fixed share of 0 — leave it there and you are running a collection for a bill you are carrying none of.
• One thing per group. A share always applies to the group's whole total, never to a single expense, so a second cause is a second group. Two causes in one group means everybody who joined for one is paying for both.
• Give somebody else the right to record deposits. A collection only one person can update stalls the week they are away — "Manage expenses" on their membership is the smallest right that fixes it.
• Enter who paid, not who was billed. The payer is where the credit lands, and the settlement plan is built on it.

Worth knowing

• No money moves through the app. No card, no escrow, no payout. It divides, tracks and reminds; the bank does the rest.
• There is no target amount. The total is whatever has been recorded as expenses, so enter the invoice as soon as you have it rather than in instalments as it gets paid.
• Percentages do not have to add up to 100. Thirteen members on 1 each is a perfectly good group, and each of them owes a thirteenth of the remainder.
• A deposit is never negative. Money handed straight to another member does show as a minus in that member's deposits column — but that is the recipient's side of somebody else's payment, not something enterable on its own.
• Odd cents. A remainder that does not divide cleanly among percentage members can leave a few cents standing as a coverage-gap warning; the equal split hands the odd cents to the members who joined first and always adds up exactly.
• Pledges bigger than the bill. If the fixed amounts together exceed the total, the remainder turns negative and everybody on a percentage ends up with a share below zero. The arithmetic stays consistent — the group has simply over-raised, which is a conversation rather than a calculation.
• The currency is a label. Nothing here converts anything, so a contributor abroad sends the figure the group shows and the exchange happens at their bank.
• The public link shows everything in the group to anybody who has it, names and standings included. For a collection that is often exactly right — but it is a decision, which is why it is off until you make it.

Common questions

Do the people chipping in need an account?

No. A member needs a name and a share, and that is all — you can type in two hundred of them at once. An account is worth having for the people who want to see their own standing and answer for themselves; everybody else is carried for the accounting only.

Somebody joined late. Do I have to correct everybody else's share?

No, and that is the point of a percentage. Add them on the same percentage as the rest and every existing share drops by itself — the percentages are weighed against each other, so the arithmetic redistributes the moment the member exists.

One person can only give a set amount. How do I enter that?

As a fixed amount, with the group switched to "Each member has their own share". A fixed amount comes off the total first and stays where it is; everybody on a percentage then shares what is left of the bill rather than the bill itself.

Can I record the goal we want to reach?

There is no target field. The group's total expenses is the target, so enter the bill — or the quote, or the down payment that has already gone out — as an expense, and what is still missing is the gap between that total and what has been paid in.

The group's pot is holding money. How do I pay it out to the person who bought everything?

Outside the app, and the settlement plan says so rather than pretending otherwise: CostDivider cannot record a payout from the pot. Where one person is out of pocket from the start, record each contribution as paid straight to them instead — then every balance closes to zero on its own.

Example figures. Green means the group owes that person money; red means they owe the group.

Next

• Settling up a shared gift
• Settling up a shared move-in budget
• Settling up a shared holiday
• Settling up the flatshare
• Settling up utility costs for a house or flat
• Splitting the running costs when part of your home is used for a business