A ledger that stays balanced.

Each person you deal with gets their own contact and their own timeline of everything that has passed between you. The balance at the top is worked out from that timeline every time it is shown, so the figure and its history can never tell you two different things.

• A running timeline per contact: money given, money received, adjustments and settlements, each with its date and note.
• Items as well as money — a drill, a book, a bike. Not everything lent has an amount.
• One button settles an account: it writes a zeroing entry rather than erasing anything, so the history survives the balance going to nil.
• Follow-up reminders per contact, and a printable statement of everything between you.
• Contacts are LifeRoster's own, not your phone's address book — nothing reads your contacts.
• A contact can be linked to someone's LifeRoster account, which is what makes sharing possible later.

Enter the bill, say who was in on it and how it should be divided. LifeRoster works out each person's share exactly — the shares always add back up to the total, with nothing left over — and turns the result into ordinary ledger entries.

• Divide equally, by exact amounts, or by percentages.
• Whoever paid is part of the record, so the maths works the same whether it was you or somebody else.
• Your own share is written into Expenses, so shared spending appears in your normal spending totals — but only your share. Fronting the whole table's dinner is lending, not spending.
• Debts between two other people are shown for the record and never enter your ledger.
• Each split has its own detail screen showing how it was divided and who has settled.
• This tab holds one-off splits; a split that belongs to a group lives on that group's screen instead, so the same bill never appears twice.

A group is a ledger, not a pile of splits. Across a trip or a shared flat, everybody ends up owing in both directions, so settling bill by bill is the wrong unit. The group nets each member down to a single position, and one payment clears it.

• Named groups with members, a net position per member, and archiving when the trip is over.
• A 'who pays whom' summary that turns everyone's position into the shortest set of payments.
• Settle a member in full or in part; a settlement clears their net position without marking any individual bill paid.
• Managed groups, for when you are the one paying for everything: every debt routes through you as one net figure per member, so no member is ever left owing another member.
• Turning managed mode on or off recalculates the group's existing splits into the other model rather than leaving two rules running side by side.

You can connect with other LifeRoster accounts and share a split with the people in it. This is the one part of the product that involves anybody else, and it is built so that it never touches the rest — your own ledger stays yours and stays offline.

• Find someone by their exact username, email or phone; there is no directory to browse.
• A discoverability setting controls whether you can be found at all — and 'no such person' and 'not discoverable' look identical from outside, on purpose.
• Send, accept or decline connection requests, tag someone as a friend or family, and block or remove them.
• Sharing a split publishes a copy the participants can read. Only the person who created it can edit it, and each participant settles only their own line.
• A split someone shared with you is a record, not your ledger. It changes none of your balances until you explicitly log it — and then it becomes an ordinary entry against a contact of your own.
• The split is saved on your device first, so a connection problem means 'saved, not yet shared' rather than a split you have to enter again.
• Accepting a connection back-shares the splits that person was already in, so connecting later does not mean starting from the next bill.