Group trips run on fronted money — someone books the shuttle, someone else buys four people's gas canisters. The Expenses tab keeps score so nobody has to.
Adding An Expense
Add an expense with a title, amount, date and who paid, then split it between members — evenly or with custom amounts per person. Pack Shadows join in like anyone else, as payer or ower. Each expense also takes:
- a category — Transport, Food, Groceries, Stay, Permit, Gear or Other — shown as an icon tile so the list scans easily
- an optional link (the booking confirmation, the receipt, the campsite page)
- notes, and an optional link to the itinerary item it belongs to
Planned Vs Actual
Expenses can be planned (the ferry you'll book next month) or actual (money already spent). Planned expenses keep future costs visible without touching anyone's balance — they're excluded from the running totals until they become real. A planned expense can even leave the payer as TBD while the group figures out who's booking. When the money moves, flip it to actual.
Private Expenses
Not every trip cost is the pack's business. Your flights, the drive to the trailhead, the new rain jacket — real money you're spending on this hike, but nothing anyone else needs to see or chip in for.
In the expense form, the Split among header is a switch: flip it to Private and the whole splitting section disappears, because there's nothing to split. A private expense:
- is visible only to you — it never appears in anyone else's list, balance, settle-up, activity log or expense summary email
- counts towards your own total cost in the Your position panel, so that figure finally answers "what is this trip costing me" rather than "what do I owe the pack"
- can be planned or actual, same as any other
- sits in the list with everything else — shaded a little differently, and carrying a PRIVATE pill where the split count normally goes. Hover the pill for a reminder of what it means. The pack's figures beside it — trip total, average per hiker, balances, the settle-up, the projected split — are built from shared expenses alone, so they read exactly the same for you as they do for everybody else
Private expenses work whatever your role — even on view only, since they're your own records rather than the pack's. They can't be linked to an itinerary entry, because an itinerary entry is shared with the whole hike. If you decide a private expense should be shared after all, edit it and flip the switch back.
Exporting: the PDF export leaves private expenses out by default, so the file is safe to send to the pack. When you have some, the export dialog offers a tick box to include them in a list of their own.
Balances And Settling Up
The Your position panel shows where you stand: what you've paid, what your share is, and whether you're owed or owing overall.
When the trip winds down, the settle-up suggestion turns the whole tangle into the smallest possible set of payments — "Alex pays Sam $62" beats eleven micro-transfers. Record each reimbursement as it's paid and the balances update until everyone's square.
Tip: When the owner closes the hike, everyone gets a final expense summary email with the settlement — a clean record for the group chat sceptics.
Adding Expenses Offline
You can add an expense — or plan a purchase — with no reception at all. It appears straight away marked Queued, counts towards the trip total and everyone's balances, and sends itself the moment you're back in range. Until then it's yours to change or discard, so a wrong amount typed at camp is a two-tap fix.
Recording a reimbursement works offline too, with one rule: you can only log a payment you made. Both people are standing there when cash changes hands, and offline neither can see that the other has already logged it — so the person who handed the money over is the one who writes it down.
Two things still wait for a connection: editing or deleting an expense that's already saved (a pack mate may have changed it since), and linking one to an itinerary entry. The suggested settle-up also pauses while anything is queued — the balances above it are already up to date, but the payment plan is only worth drawing once everyone's entries have landed.
For the full picture of what does and doesn't work offline, see offline mode.
Currency
Each hike has one currency, chosen when it's created — every amount on the hike uses it.