Using OweMe

A guide for someone who has just installed it and has never used anything like it before. Ten minutes end to end; the first two sections are enough to be useful.

Everything below follows one trip — Ana, Ben and Cleo in Lisbon — so the numbers on this page are the numbers you would actually see. It is worth following that example rather than skimming the headings: the whole app is one idea repeated, and once the idea lands the rest is buttons.

What this app is, in one paragraph

OweMe keeps track of who owes who when a group of people share costs — a holiday, a flat, a dinner. One person pays for something, you record it, and the app works out what everybody's share is and who is up or down overall.

It never moves money. There is no card, no bank account, no wallet, no payment. When you settle up you pay your friend however you already do — cash, bank transfer, whatever — and then tell the app you did. It is a shared notebook that does the arithmetic, not a payment app. That is deliberate, and it is why you never have to hand it any financial details.

That last point is the one that trips people up, and it is the whole model: you are owed what you paid, minus your own share. Nothing else in this guide is harder than that.

The first five minutes

If you do nothing else, do this. It takes about two minutes and produces a real answer.

1. Groups tab → + → name it Lisbon trip, currency EUR, Create
2. Open it → People → add Ben and Cleo by name
3. Tap + → 90 → Dinner → paid by Ana → split equally → Save
4. Tap Balances

You should be looking at Ana +€60, Ben −€30, Cleo −€30. That is the app working.

You did not have to invite anybody to get there, and that is deliberate — Ben and Cleo are just names until they install anything. See Inviting somebody properly when you want them to see it too.

One thing the free plan changes: a group can hold one person who is not on OweMe, so Cleo is where it asks you to upgrade. To follow along for free, send Cleo an invite instead — that is free on every plan — or try it with just you and Ben.

1. Make a group

Everything lives in a group. A group is just a name and the people in it — a holiday, a household, a regular dinner.

1. Open the Groups tab
2. Tap the + button
3. Name it (Lisbon trip), pick a currency, create

Then add the people. Tap the group, open the People tab, and add them by name — Sam from work is a perfectly good entry.

People do not need the app. You can add someone by name alone, and the app tracks their share exactly as it would anyone else's. If they install it later you can send them an invite and their whole history comes with them, including everything you recorded before they arrived. Nobody is left out for not having signed up.

The free plan covers one such person per group; Premium, or a premium group, lifts that. Inviting somebody to join is free on every plan, and nobody already in a group is ever removed because a plan changed.

Putting a group away

Drag a group card sideways on the Groups tab. Left uncovers Archive, right uncovers Delete. Neither happens on the swipe itself — the gesture only uncovers the button, and you still have to tap it.

Archiving takes the group off the list and changes nothing else; it is under Profile → Archived groups whenever you want it back. Deleting asks first, and then removes the group for everybody in it along with every expense and settlement in it. Neither one gives you back a group slot on the free plan — see Things that surprise people.

Inviting somebody properly

From the group's People tab, or the Friends tab, tap Invite. You get a link and a QR code — the QR is the same link, and is the fast way to do it when the other person is standing next to you.

Treat the link like a key, because it is one: whoever opens it joins that group and can see everything in it. It only ever works for that one group, it expires after seven days, and you can revoke it from the same screen. Tapping your own link twice does not use it up.

There is a second way in, for people you already split with. In a group's People tab, tap the + beside somebody's name to put them on your Friends list — this is private, they are not told, and it grants them nothing. From then on, Friends → Invite to group puts them into any other group without a link at all. They see the invitation in their own app, and nothing appears in that group until they accept it.

2. Add an expense

This is the thing you will do most.

1. Open the group, tap +
2. How much it was, and in which currency
3. What it was for — Dinner at Time Out Market
4. Who paid. Usually one person. It can be several, and the amounts have to add up to the total — the app tells you if they do not
5. Who shares it, and how

Where a new expense starts

The + in the middle of the bar belongs to whichever tab you are on: an expense from Home, a new group from Groups, an invite from Friends.

From Home it opens the expense screen without asking which group, because one group wears a star — the default. Tap the star on a group card to move it, or filter Home to a group and it moves on its own. If no group is starred and you have more than one, the screen asks, which is the only time it does.

Splitting

• Equally — the default, and right nearly always. Four people, one bill, everyone owes a quarter.
• Exact — you type each person's amount. For when three of you had starters and one did not.
• Shares — proportions rather than amounts. A couple in a room counts as 2, a single person as 1, and the app divides accordingly. Useful for rent.

The same €90 dinner, split each way, so you can see what changes:

Percentages work too, and behave like shares that happen to add to 100.

The rounding is handled for you and always adds back to the exact total: a £10 bill between three people is 3.34 / 3.33 / 3.33, never 3.33 three times with a penny unaccounted for. Whichever way you split it, the column always sums to the bill — if it cannot, the app says so before it lets you save.

Scanning a receipt

On the add-expense screen there is Scan receipt. Photograph the receipt (or pick a photo you already have) and OweMe reads the amounts off it.

The photo never leaves your phone — the reading happens on the device, which is why it works with no signal at all, and why there is nothing to upload. It is a premium feature, with 200 scans a month.

What comes back is a suggestion, never an entry. Every amount stays editable, and a total found next to the word TOTAL is shown differently from one that is merely the largest number on the page — only one of those is worth trusting without a second look.

Who had what

Once a receipt is read you can tap Split by item. You get the list of things bought with everybody's name under each one; tap the names of whoever shared that item. OweMe turns the taps into one exact amount per person, and shows the running total against the bill so a misread line is obvious before you save it.

Nothing is assigned by default. This is the honest way to split a table where two people had the wine.

3. Things that happen every month

Rent, the internet bill, a shared subscription. Add the expense as usual, and at the bottom of the form set Repeats to daily, weekly, monthly or yearly instead of Once: the amount, who pays and how it splits are the schedule.

A schedule is not an expense. It holds no money and appears in no balance; what it does is create an ordinary expense each time it comes round, which you can then edit or void like any other.

Schedules live on the group's Expenses tab, under Repeating, each with what it will do next:

• Tap one to correct it. Rent going up is an edit, not a new schedule — the cadence included.
• Pause stops it without losing anything. The template holds the split, and somebody who stops paying rent for two months has not stopped having a tenancy; rebuilding "equally between these four, Ana pays" from memory is the tedious part.
• The bin deletes it, after asking. Every expense it has already added stays where it is, and no balance moves.

Monthly means the same day, not "thirty days". Rent due on the 31st falls on the 28th in February and goes back to the 31st in March. It does not quietly become the 28th forever.

4. Read the balances

Open a group and tap the Balances tab.

Each person shows one number: what they are owed overall, or what they owe overall. It is not a list of individual debts, it is the net position. If you paid for dinner and Sam paid for the taxi, the app nets those against each other rather than making you both pay each other.

Back to Lisbon. Ana paid the €90 dinner; the next day Ben paid €60 for the taxi, split the same three ways:

The Home tab does the same across every group at once — the single number at the top is your overall position. Tap either half of that card — Owed to you or You owe — and it opens the list of who, by name and group.

Making Home show one group

Under the greeting there is a bar reading Showing. Tap it, pick a group, and every figure below it narrows to that group: the balance, anything awaiting you, the counts and the spending. The bar turns blue and grows an × while it is on, so a filtered dashboard never looks like an empty one.

Picking a group here also stars it, which is what makes the + open straight into it — see Where a new expense starts. Clearing the filter leaves the star where it is.

The three tiles underneath count what is in view and each opens what it counts: unfiltered, groups goes to the Groups tab and expenses breaks down by group; filtered, they go straight into that group — people on its People tab, expenses on its Expenses tab.

Different currencies stay separate

If a trip has euros and yen in it, you will see a euro balance and a yen balance. The app will not add them together, because converting means picking an exchange rate, and a rate you did not choose would silently change who owes what. Premium lets you set a rate per group if you want one combined figure.

What it all cost

Balances answer who owes whom. They do not answer what did this trip cost, and those are different questions — squaring up moves a balance and changes the cost of nothing.

Open a group's Expenses tab and the first card is Total spent: what the group has spent altogether, and how many expenses make it up. Paying somebody back never moves it.

Home gives the same answer name by name, under Who spent what — one receipt per group:

Two columns, because what did Ana spend has two honest answers:

• paid — what left her pocket. Ana bought the €90 dinner, so hers reads €90.
• share — the part of the bills that was hers: €30 of the dinner and €20 of the taxi, so €50.

Both columns come to the same total. And the gap between a person's two figures is exactly their balance from the table at the top of this section — Ana is +€40 because she paid €90 and consumed €50. That is the whole of the arithmetic, printed where you can check it.

Somebody who paid for something they had no part of shows 0.00 under share, and somebody who only ever tagged along shows 0.00 under paid. Neither is an error; they are the two ends of the same story.

A group that spent in two currencies gets a slip for each. A receipt that added euros to yen under a rule would be a wrong number with a line under it.

5. Settle up

When it is time to square up, open Balances and tap Settle up.

The app works out the fewest payments that clear everybody. With four people tangled up you might expect six transfers; it will usually find three. Follow the list.

In Lisbon there are six directions money could flow between three people, and four debts that actually exist. OweMe asks for two payments, both of them Cleo's:

Notice that Ben never pays anybody — even though, once the dinner and the taxi are netted off, he owes Ana €10. That is normal, and it is the one thing about settle-up worth understanding: the app is clearing the whole group in as few payments as it can, not walking each individual debt back one at a time. So you may be asked to pay somebody you never bought anything with, to hand over more than your own share of a particular bill, or to pay nothing at all while still owing somebody. The arithmetic is the same; the number of bank transfers is smaller.

Then pay them — cash, transfer, however you normally would — and tap Mark paid to record it. The balance updates.

You can do the whole thing from Home. Under the two figures there is a Settle up button. When there is only one payment behind the number it names the person — Settle up with Ben — and goes straight to the confirmation. When there are several it opens the list of who owes who, and each line is the button: tap the one you have paid. Either way you get the same confirmation screen, and it still takes a second, deliberate tap.

Recording a payment is a statement: "I gave Sam £20." Nothing moved inside the app. If you tap it by mistake, open the person from the Balances tab and tap Undo. The record stays visible, marked as undone, so "why did my balance change?" always has an answer.

The other person gets a say

When somebody records a payment to you, it shows up under Awaiting you, and you can confirm it or dispute it.

This is the one place OweMe is deliberately two-sided. A balance that changed because somebody else said they paid you, with no way for you to say "no you did not", would be a shared ledger that only one person controls. Confirming is the normal case and takes a tap. Disputing does not delete anything or accuse anybody — it marks the record as not agreed, and leaves both of you looking at the same screen while you sort it out.

We are not the referee here. We only make sure you are both looking at the same thing.

Choosing how you paid

When you mark a payment you can say whether it was cash, a bank transfer or something else. It changes no arithmetic at all. It is there because "did you give me that in cash?" is the question that comes up three weeks later.

6. What is free, and what is not

Splitting, balances and settle-up are free forever. No tier gates the arithmetic — that would be a strange thing to charge for.

The free plan includes:

• Two groups, ever. Not two at a time — two. Archived and deleted ones still count.
• 90 days of history. Older expenses still count towards balances; you just cannot browse back past them.
• 300 expenses in each of them.
• As many people in them as you like who join with an account — there is no cap on members, on either plan — and one person per group who is not on OweMe. Inviting anybody to join is free, always.
• All four split types, multiple payers, recurring expenses, and the settle-up optimizer.
• 156 currencies and 32 categories.
• CSV export — including everything outside the 90-day window. A limit that stopped you taking your own data with you would be a different kind of limit.

Premium adds six things: unlimited groups, unlimited history, receipt scanning (200 a month), offline mode on up to five devices, currency conversion, and as many people who are not on OweMe as a group needs. There is also a one-off premium group — a single payment that upgrades one group for everyone in it, including people who have never paid, for 30 days. Good for one holiday. It does not renew: after 30 days the group goes back to normal, nothing in it is deleted, and you can buy it again if you need longer.

If you have a code, enter it on the Premium screen under Restore purchases → Have a code?

7. Things that surprise people

Archiving does not free up a group slot. The free plan is two groups ever. Archiving hides one from the list; it still counts.

Deleting your account does not wreck your friends' balances. Your entries stay, attributed to a name rather than an account, so nobody else's arithmetic silently changes because you left.

A premium group does not unlock offline mode for you. Offline mode belongs to you, not to a group — it keeps a copy of every group you are in, so one group's purchase cannot pay for it. A group purchase unlocks the things that belong to the group: full history, currency conversion, no expense cap, people who are not on OweMe, and receipt scanning in that group.

Nothing is ever really deleted. Voided expenses and undone settlements stay visible, marked. In a shared ledger, an entry that vanishes is an argument waiting to happen.

Getting around

Four tabs along the bottom:

• Home — your overall position across every group, and where the money went.
• Groups — the groups themselves.
• Friends — the people you have chosen to keep, plus any invitations waiting on you. It is a list you build: open a group's People tab and tap the + beside a name. Adding somebody is private and gives them nothing; what it buys you is inviting them into another group without a link.
• Profile — your name, your account, appearance, help, and the legal documents.

The round button in the middle belongs to the tab it is on — an expense from Home, a new group from Groups, an invite from Friends. On Profile there is nothing to add and it does not pretend otherwise.

You can also swipe left and right to move between tabs. The page follows your finger, so you can pull the next tab halfway in to look and let it go back; a quick flick is enough to change. Over a list of groups the rows have their own sideways gesture, so swipe from the edge of the screen or from any gap between cards.

Panels that rise from the bottom — who owes who, which group Home is showing, your name — close with a tap on the dimmed page behind them, or by dragging them down by their top edge.

Activity, from Home, is everything that has happened across your groups, newest first. It covers expenses and settlements. It does not yet cover people joining or leaving, and the screen says so rather than quietly omitting them.

Three small marks

They sit close together and mean entirely different things:

Your name

Tap your name at the top of Profile to change it. The whole card is the button — the small pencil beside it is a hint, not the target.

It is the name everybody in your groups sees, so changing it changes it everywhere at once: in every group you are still in, the next time their app syncs. Groups you have left keep the name you had when you left them, because that is what the entries there were signed with, and rewriting it would rename somebody in a group they are no longer part of.

One case worth knowing about. Anybody can rename a member inside their own group, which is how a placeholder called "Dad" becomes "Dad (ski trip)" — and if somebody has renamed you, your own change wins from then on. The alternative would be a rename that appeared to work and then did nothing in exactly the groups where it mattered most.

Your email address is a separate thing, under Profile → Account, and changing it asks for your password. That is deliberate: your name is what people call you, but your address is how you sign in and how you get back in if you are ever locked out.

Taking your data out

Two exports, both free:

• Group settings → Export as CSV — one group as a spreadsheet, including entries outside the free window.
• Profile → Privacy & terms → Download a copy of my data — everything we hold about you, as JSON. It lists in the file what it leaves out and why.

Amounts come out as whole minor units with the currency code and its exponent, so a spreadsheet can total them without guessing where the decimal point goes.

Getting help

The Help section under Profile answers the questions that come up most, and the same screen opens the in-app tour — fourteen screens covering the same ground as this page, in about a minute. It is what the app shows on a new device before you sign in, and it is skippable in one tap.

If something here is wrong or unclear, that is worth reporting — a guide that misleads is worse than no guide.