How to share a budget with your partner

Send the invitation

There are two places to start. Open People and choose Add Connection, or go straight to the budget or event you want to share and add the person there. Either way the form asks for one thing: their email address.

What happens next depends on whether that address already has an account. If it does, the person is told you want to connect, and the request waits on their own People page. If not, SavingStat invites them to sign up, and the request appears once they register with that address.

Until then the connection is pending. Pending grants nothing at all. If you invited them to a budget or an event at the same time, that share is not lost: it waits behind the connection and is created for them the moment they accept.

How the other person accepts

The other person accepts from their own account. Their copy of the request carries Accept and a way to turn it down; declining removes the request rather than recording a refusal, and drops any budget or event share queued behind it.

Accepting a budget or event they were invited to also accepts the connection, so one tap on their side can do both.

Your own copy carries neither button, because you sent the request. Instead you can cancel it while it is pending, and remove the connection later once it has been accepted.

Share a budget with your partner

A connection on its own still shares nothing. Sharing happens one budget at a time, by adding your partner to it as a member.

1. Open the budget, choose Edit Budget, then the Ownership tab.
2. Under Members, choose Add User.
3. Pick them from the list, or type an email address in the same dialog. The list holds the people who have accepted your connection and the ones you have already invited, marked as not accepted yet, so somebody you invited to one budget is one tap away from the next.

Somebody already connected joins as a member with the invitation pending, and the budget appears on their budgets list with a tick and a cross on it: the tick accepts, the cross hands it back. Somebody not connected yet gets the connection request first, and the membership is created for them when they accept.

What a member can see

A member sees every expense in the budget, not only their own, each labelled with whoever paid for it, and can file spending against it. The month's figures cover everyone in the budget, while each person can still read their own share on its own. One thing stays back. For somebody else's expense, the wallet it came out of is not shown.

Nothing else travels with the budget. Your wallets, your transactions and any budget you did not share remain yours alone, so sharing a budget is not sharing an account. The owner adds and removes members, and a member can leave on their own.