Trip money: shared pool or personal allowances, fees and changing cash back

Short version: record the currency you buy as one purchase, with the fee counted in what it cost. Put some of it in a shared trip pool, hand out personal allowances, or both. SplitExpenZ tracks who is holding the cash and who owns it, which are not always the same person. When you change leftover cash back, any gain or loss on the rate is shared by whoever owned that cash.

What is "trip money"?

Trip money is foreign currency a group buys up front and then spends during the trip: baht changed at the airport, dong bought before you flew. It is different from an ordinary bill. A bill answers "who had this, and who owes whom?". Trip money answers "we bought ฿12,000 between three of us, so where is it now?".

In SplitExpenZ, trip money lives in a Trip or Foreign trip group, under Trip money. It keeps two records that meet in one place. Buying the currency is an ordinary bill in the group. Where the cash goes afterwards is tracked separately, in the currency you bought.

How do you record a currency purchase, and why does the fee count?

You record a purchase once, with:

• what you paid, and any fee on top;
• what you received, in the foreign currency;
• who paid for it, and how much each person put in;
• who shares the cost.

The fee is part of what the currency cost. If only the exchanged amount were split, the person who stood at the counter would quietly pay the fee alone, and the rate would look better than it was. So what the contributors put in has to add up to the price plus the fee.

The purchase has to be paid in the group's settlement currency. A trip that settles in rupees buys its baht with rupees, so the cost can be split like any other bill. Because it is an ordinary bill, whoever paid at the counter is owed by the others, exactly as if they had paid for a hotel.

Should you use a shared trip pool or personal allowances?

When you record the purchase, you decide where the cash goes:

• The trip pool is shared money for shared bills: taxis, group dinners, entry tickets.
• Personal allowances are amounts handed to each person for their own spending. Allowances can only go to members of the group.
• Anything you don't place stays unallocated, and the app names it rather than leaving a gap the totals can't explain.

Which works better depends on how your group travels. If you eat and move around together, a bigger pool keeps things simple. If people split up during the day, allowances save you from recording every coffee as a group bill. Many groups do both.

To pay a shared bill from the pool, add a bill and choose the trip pool as where it was paid from. It is then split like any other bill. If everyone owns an equal part of the pool and the bill is split equally, nobody's balance moves, because each person paid for exactly what they had. To spend from your own allowance on yourself, use Spend. That creates no debt, because the money was already yours.

Who holds the cash, and who owns it?

This is the distinction that makes trip money work. You own what you paid for: your share of the purchase cost. Holding is just whose pocket the cash is in.

Say Asha carries the whole trip pool in her bag. She is holding it, but she doesn't own more of it than her share. When you Move money between people, you change who holds it, not who owns it. And when a dinner is paid from cash someone is only carrying for others, it is charged to the people who own that cash, not to the person who happened to hand it over.

The Trip money screen shows what is Left, what has been spent, and who it is Held by, so the group can see where the cash is at any point.

Can one bill be paid from the pool and your own cash?

Yes, in the mobile apps. Say a dinner comes to ฿2,000 and the pool only has ฿1,500 left. In the Android or iPhone app, add the trip pool as one payer for ฿1,500 and Ben as another for the ฿500 he paid from his own pocket. Both parts are saved together, so the bill and the pool always agree.

On the web, a bill is paid either from trip money or from someone's own money, not a mix of the two.

Changing leftover cash back: who gains or loses?

At the end of a trip there is usually some cash left. Changing it back is a second exchange with its own rate and often its own fee, so what comes back is almost never what that cash cost. Somebody is a little better or worse off, and that difference belongs to the people who owned the cash.

When you record a Change back, you say how much went over the counter, what came back and who got it. SplitExpenZ records the money that came back as owed to the owners, in proportion to what each of them owned, and owed by whoever took the cash. The owners were already charged what the currency cost when it was bought, so any gain or loss is shared among them automatically. There is no separate gain or loss line to settle; it is already part of everyone's balance.

How do you close trip money or undo a mistake?

You can close trip money only when every part of it is empty: the pool, every allowance and anything unallocated. Getting there takes a real action for each: spend it, hand it to someone, or change it back. If something is left, the app says where.

If you record something by mistake, reverse it. The history is never rewritten: a reversal is a new entry that points to the original, the cash goes back where it came from, and any bill it paid for is removed. The history shows both what was recorded and that it was taken back.

One more rule protects the group: you can't leave while you still own or hold trip money. Spend it, hand it over or change it back first.

A worked example

This example is illustrative. The names and numbers are made up and the exchange rates are examples, not live rates. Asha, Ben and Chen go to Thailand, and their trip settles in rupees.

Asha buys ฿12,000 for ₹30,000 plus a ₹600 fee, so the baht cost ₹30,600, or ₹2.55 each. The three share the cost equally, ₹10,200 each, so each owns ฿4,000. They put ฿6,000 in the trip pool and give each person a ฿2,000 allowance.

Steps 2 and 3 move nobody's balance. The dinner was paid from money all three owned equally and split equally. Ben's souvenir came out of his own allowance.

In step 4, the ฿4,500 had cost ₹11,475 at ₹2.55, but it fetched ₹10,800 at the counter. That is ₹675 less, or ₹225 each, and it is already reflected in the balances. Ben and Chen each pay Asha ₹6,600. Their remaining allowances are still theirs to spend or change back.

If you're paying in several currencies at once, read how to split trip costs when you pay in several currencies. For household or everyday group bills, see how to split roommate and group expenses fairly. Step-by-step instructions are in help with trip money, and the apps are on the download page.