Transactions with friends

Commingle can handle much more than simply splitting a dinner bill. Here are a few useful ways to record shared expenses, existing debts and other transactions between friends.

Splitting expenses

Once you’re friends on Commingle, you can split any expense between you in several ways:

• Evenly – everyone gets an equal share.
• By exact amounts – specify exactly how much of the expense belongs to each person, down to the cent.
• By percentage – specify what percentage belongs to each person.
• By shares – split proportionally using any unit that makes sense for the expense.

Shares are particularly useful when everyone’s usage isn’t equal.

Imagine three friends sharing a pizza. Tom eats 4 slices, John eats 3 and Kate eats just 1. Simply enter 4 shares for Tom, 3 for John and 1 for Kate. Commingle divides the total across all 8 shares automatically.

Shares don’t have to represent physical items. They could represent nights spent in an Airbnb, kilometres travelled by car, days on a trip or almost anything else.

Who paid?

It’s usually easiest if the person who actually paid adds the transaction. Commingle considers the person adding a shared expense to be the payer by default.

You can change the payer in the additional options while adding the transaction.

An expense can also have multiple payers. If two or more people contributed to the payment, simply specify how much each person paid. Commingle will work out everyone’s resulting balance.

The same principle applies to shared income: you can specify who actually received the money.

Setting an initial balance

You might already owe each other money when you start using Commingle. There’s no need to wait for a new expense to establish the correct balance.

You can recreate the original expense or income that caused the debt, or simply record it as a transfer.

For example, if a friend already owes you $50, record a $50 transfer from you to your friend. This establishes that they owe you $50 without adding an artificial expense to your spending history.

You can backdate either type of transaction if you want your Commingle history to reflect when it actually happened.

Buying and selling between friends

If you buy or sell something to another Commingle user, you can represent it as a shared transaction, but there’s a better way.

For example, if you sell a bicycle to a friend for $300:

1. You record $300 of personal income from selling the bicycle.
2. Your friend records a $300 personal expense for buying it.
3. Record a $300 transfer from your friend to you.

This way, both sides get an accurate financial history: the seller sees the income in their charts, while the buyer sees the expense in theirs. The transfer between you ensures your shared balance and debts are calculated correctly.

If the money hasn’t actually changed hands yet, the transfer can still represent the amount owed between you.