Calculating expenses of couples or families with shared balances
Back in ancient history, around the same time Pharaoh Chephren built the Great Sphinx of Giza, we built various modes of splitting expenses into Kittysplit (ok actually it was in 2017). You’ve probably seen these under “Split differently” when adding an expense.
The power mode that allows you to do almost anything is to split an expense by “Weight”: You can, for example, enter the number of nights if some of your friends stayed longer in the rented home than others. Or you can use it to do a split by percent, simply by using weights that add up to 100 - the calculation is equivalent to % in that case.
Popular request: grouping participants together, or default splits
Another possible case for expenses split by weight is to use it for different numbers of people grouped together, usually for a family or a couple who share their expenses and therefore don’t want to have individual balances or potential settlements between each other. It was already possible to do this with weights, but the weights had to be entered for every expense, which of course was too cumbersome to do every time.
Grouping participants together has been a recurring feature request. Some advanced Kittysplit users also asked us to allow setting a “default split” or “default weights”. It became clear that these are actually the same thing from a purely technical side. So after a somewhat extended phase of hiatus of Kittysplit development because other work kept us too busy, we finally got to focus on the best solution to cover these requests.
Super Kitty to the rescue - introducing default splits for families, couples and everything else
By evaluating all the feedback we had received, we figured the most common case are Kitties that include either families or couples who share their expenses. That’s why it is called “Number of People” and can be set per participant. But of course you can use it for any other use case that you see for “default weights” or “default split”.
The setup is easy: In any Super Kitty, choose “Manage Participants” in the top right drop down menu, and edit a participant. A “participant” in this case can be a couple, family or any other group of people, so you can enter anything like “Jenna & James” or “Adams Family” as name. You can then set the number of people for each group there. Note that decimal numbers are allowed, which can be used if you want to calculate a different amount for children than for adults. For example, for a family with 2 adults and one child, you could enter 2.5 people.
From now on, every expense is split by the number of people in the groups by default, but you can of course still adjust any individual expense if it requires a different split. Note that changing the number of participants DOESN’T change the split for existing expenses - we might change that in the future. For now, you’d have to edit them one by one and choose to split by number of people. So best set up the groups correctly before adding all your expenses!
This is a Super Kitty only feature - for good reasons
Apart that our continued development work to improve Kittysplit takes a lot of time and Kittysplit is still far from paying our bills, we made this a Super Kitty only feature for two reasons: Firstly, it is a somewhat advanced feature that not everybody needs.
And secondly, you can of course have couples or other groups participating in any free Kitty, just with the difference that each person will have their own balance in the final calculations - the way Kittysplit has worked happily for most people for many years. This feature simply adds more convenience and extra options.
More goodies are on the way! 🎁
Have you tried the feature yet? For which case do you use it in your Kitty? Do give us feedback and let us know what you think!
Also, we are currently working on a bunch of other things that we’ll be launching within the coming months.