Events

What an event is

An event is an occasion that spending belongs to: a trip, a wedding, a renovation, a house move. It has a name, an emoji and a description, and any expense can be filed against it alongside its ordinary category.

Its start date is not something you type in. An event reports the date of the earliest expense recorded against it, so a new event has no date at all until the first cost lands in it. That is usually the flights or the deposit, months before the thing itself.

One page disagrees with that. The event's Statistics tab works its start date out from the earliest expense or the earliest income, whichever came first, while the event itself only ever looks at expenses. An event that took money in before it spent any therefore starts earlier on that tab than it does everywhere else.

How this differs from a budget

Events and budgets are both named containers with an owner and members, and both gather spending that would otherwise scatter across your ordinary categories. The difference is shape. A budget is ongoing; an event has an end.

That shows up in the totals. A budget reports the current month and starts again with the next one, which is what you want from something like Household. An event totals everything ever filed against it, from the flights booked in March to the taxi home. That is one figure for the whole occasion, however long it took to accumulate.

The people in it

Everyone in an event is either its owner or a member, and an invitation is pending until the person accepts it, exactly as with a budget.

Ownership can be handed over. The person taking it on has to be in the event already, and when the transfer goes through the previous owner stays on as an ordinary member, which is what you want when the person who set the trip up is not the person settling it up.

After it ends

Archiving is how an event closes. It moves out of your active list, and nothing it recorded is touched: the expenses stay where they are, still attached, still counted in the event's total if you go and look.

Archiving is also personal. What gets archived is your own participation, not the event, so putting a finished trip out of your way leaves everyone else's list alone. Deleting is the other option, and it is deliberately hard to reach. An event with more than one person in it cannot be deleted at all, and deleting one that can be leaves every expense in place, simply no longer attached to anything.