Invite your partner and share a budget

Connecting to the other person by email, getting that accepted, and putting one budget in front of both of you.

Send the invitation

Open People and choose Add Connection. The form asks for one thing: their email address.

What happens next depends on whether that address already belongs to an account. If it does, they are told you want to connect and the request is waiting on their own People page. If it does not, they are invited to sign up, and the request appears for them once they register with that address.

Either way the connection sits as pending, and pending grants nothing at all. Until it is accepted there is nothing to share.

Accepting it

The other person accepts from their own account. Their copy of the request carries Accept and a way to turn it down; turning it down removes the request rather than recording a refusal.

Your copy carries neither, because you are the side that sent it. What you get instead is the option to cancel while it is still pending, and to remove the connection later once it is not.

Share a budget with them

A connection on its own still shares nothing. Sharing happens one budget at a time.

  1. Open the budget, choose Edit Budget, then the Ownership tab.
  2. Under Members, choose Add User.
  3. Pick them from the list. Only people who have already accepted your connection are offered, and only the budget's owner is shown the button.

They join as a member with the invitation pending, and the budget turns up on their budgets list with a tick and a cross on it: the tick accepts, the cross hands it back. Joining therefore takes two acceptances. The connection comes first, then the budget.

What they can see

A member sees every expense in the budget, not only their own, each labelled with whoever paid for it, and can file their own 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 it. 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 is the one who adds and removes members, and a member can leave on their own.